Poor man's integeration with phpbb

I am experimenting with a simple way to have phpbb header and footer encapsulate WP. This is a combination of calling phpbb to generate its header, then calling wp-loader to get the WP content, then phpbb to generate the footer. Also, I strip down the native WP header.php and footer.php to a bare minimum.

It actually works very well with only a couple of minor code tweaks to formatting.php and pluggable.php, and a couple of css collision fixes.

The headache I ran into was phpbb being able to find it’s href linked files once I turned on permalinks in WP. I spent hours trying to figure this out. Here’s what finally worked: putting a symbolic link to phpbb’s root directory, in every level of generated page directory from WP.

So, if I want to have links like: http://www.foo.com/blog/2010/my-post then I have to put a symbolic link to phpbb at ‘blog‘ and at ‘2010‘. It actually works, but it’s ugly.

I also tried experimenting with .htaccess to redirect any calls to ANYTHING that had /phpbb/ in it’s header request to remove any leading directory path that WP was pre-pending onto the GET request. Although that made sense to me, I couldn’t get it to work.

Should I keep hacking on this or is the redirection/permalink manipulation from WP just too complex and I’ll end up going (completely) insane?

Thanks,
Chris