Make someone register to your FORUM to view certain sections of your SITE?

i want to add a log in thing to my site to enter areas like downloads

however, i want the people who log in members of the forum. So in essence if you have a forum account u can log in

how do you do this?

i have an SMF forum and i have stuff like cPanel on my site

you can change the setting with in the forum software, atleast you usually can right?

just connect to the forum database and if the user is registered there then proceed with login. Not really hard. Simple MySQL query could determine it.

<?php
$sql = "SELECT * FROM table_name WHERE field_name='$field_name' AND field_name2='$field_name2'";
$query = mysql_query($sql) or die("Could not run query: " .mysql_erorr());
if($sql){
allow access
}else {
no acces
}
?>

That is a very basic example but essentially is what needs to be done. Obviously I left a lot of stuff out but the main query is there.

can someone help me out more

i'm not sure where you insert member names and whatnot