I'm hoping someone has already accomplished what I am trying to do and can offer me some advice.
My website currently has a member's section with a simple PHP/SQL login setup. I'm adding a Vanilla forum and would like for my current Members to have their same usernames and passwords log them into the forum. Is there any way to copy their current info into the Vanilla database? I tried to just copy and paste, but it seems the password encryptions don't match. Obviously I'm a n00b to all this.
I do want to keep the sign in systems separate because while all site Members should have access to the forum, not all users authorized for the forum should have access to the Members content.
Another option would be to bypass the vanilla-default user system and tell vanilla to reference your current user database (and password encryption) by editing the core vanilla files.
Editing the core files seems a bad idea to me, since we have a neat modular auth mechanism. Try to find the Wordpress integration page in the docs. Not everything might be interesting for you, but you'll find ideas.
I thought there was some simple way to override Vanilla's user handling to substitute your own. But the simplest would perhaps be to point Vanilla to use your user tables instead of the default tables.