Honestly, it was mostly trial and error and lots and lots of research and testing. The SMF boards have a lot of good support details. Also take a look at the exact version we are running because specific versions caused most of the problems.
SMF 1.1 RC2 & TP 0.8.6 seem to be most compatible. Yes, you are better off running a RC version of SMF lol.
And just think, we also had to deal with converters, etc. to get our PHPBB boards and accounts moved over which also only support specific versions that don't support TP lol