Yeah, I made it work, too. Man, I really wish the guys from SMF made their code more modular. Right now the skin template files consist out of one function with 1000s of lines in some cases. :/
BTW, has anybody tried updating SMF 1.1.x to SMF 2.0? 2.0 has gone gold as far as I know and it's supposed to be significantly better. I'll probably have to do some custom modding again as thsi forum uses a quite modified SMF code.