Adding CMSMS menus to SMF

[krussell]

I have a site which uses CMSMS and SMF at http://www.edinburghrc.co.uk
My SMF install is simply skinned to match my CMSMS template (essentially creating a new SMF theme where the index.template.php page is topped and tailed by the same html as my CMSMS template.
However, the SMF forum pages simply had a "Back to website" link to return to CMSMS, with no other menu options, and I always wanted to make things more seamless.

Having studied the forum, I came across various solutions to SMF integration, including this:
http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/topic,1785.0.html
This seemed a bit convoluted, and involved hacking away some key structure of the SMF pages, as well as messing with the CMSMS navigation and redirects.
Taking a simpler approach, I concluded that I only really needed to include the CMSMS menus on my SMF page to "integrate". My templates are pretty stable, so it is not a huge overhead to have to update the html in both CMSMS and SMF if something (rarely) changes.

My solution was to create a new CMSMS template with a tag referencing my menu and nothing else:
{menu template='kcr_drop_menu.tpl' collapse='0'}
and use this template to create a new page with empty content {}. This page is not shown in the menu structure.
I then added the following line to my SMF template to call the new page and display the CMSMS menu on the forums page:
readfile("http://www.edinburghrc.co.uk/menu");

This is not an original idea. I simply pulled together information from a couple of forum posts, including this one:
http://forum.cmsmadesimple.org/index.php/topic,12634.0.html
I also nicked ideas from another post, which I cannot now locate, so apologies for not crediting the originator of the idea!

I think full SMF integration is a bit of an unattainable "holy grail" at present, and the best solution is to keep the two applications separate and resort to matching templates and common navigation.

[SimonSchaufi]

you can get only the menu without anyting else like this:

index.php?mact=MenuManager,cntnt01,default,0&cntnt01showtemplate=false

[krussell]

I saw that solution in another forum post, and originally intended to use it, because it is neater. However, I wanted to use a specific template with the menu, and wasn't able to find documentation to explain the syntax of the parameters for the module action call.