User Registration, Login script modeled after punbb 1.2

Thinking about it further (and not having studied the source code yet), it seems like what I want to do would be relatively easy:

* create a database table for 'users' - either manually with phpMyadmin or using the code from the install file
* then there's a registration page, login page, admin page, userlist page, etc
* there's some code in each page detecting whether I'm logged in or not - session id?  cookies?
* that determines what links display: 'login', 'logout', 'register', etc.
* and it determines whether the user is allowed into certain directories or webpages

It sounds simple in concept.  We'll see how it goes in theory. 

I'm not sure what your point is.  Are you saying you want to do the same thing?  "a lot of posts are talking about this issue" - Really?  Which ones?  I went back 6 months and didn't find any.

It isn't as simple and easy as your post implies.

I don't want to just use punbb's login on my whole site, which is what the other posts refer to.  I want a stand-alone login system -- 'stand-alone' means it doesn't require installation of the forum; it works all by itself.  I haven't seen that discussion in the other posts; if I missed it I'd appreciate a link, but in the ones I've seen they don't talk about this at all.

I want to set up a login system that works all by itself without the installation of the forum.  For example, below are some introductory tutorials on user login.  I'm planning to start with them to learn more about what exactly is going on with the sessions, cookies, passwords, etc.  Then I'll try separating punbb's user login system from the forum code and see about making it a stand-alone system (or by then I may just write my own).

Managing Users with PHP Sessions and MySQL - http://www.sitepoint.com/article/users- … ions-mysql
Authenticate and Track Users with PHP - http://webmonkey.wired.com/webmonkey/00 … rogramming
PHP Sessions Introduction - http://www.phpfreaks.com/tutorials/41/0.php