Help with Login stuff

[Grasty]

alright im trying to redesign my website and one of the things im trying to do is make it possible for users to login on the index of the site (non vb page) it needs to log them into the forums.

The reason i want to do this is because im also in the process of installing a hack by BillsPaintball which allows you to allow only certain usergroups to access non vb pages. So therefore I want to be able to login from the index.php page (which is a non vb page)

I am running VB 3.5.4 And also keep in mind i know nothing about php, so if you ask me a whole bunch of questions about coding, i will get lost. I used Dreamweaver so it coded everything for me. And any explanations and instructions are going to need to be detailed.

ok i got the login menu showing up and i can login fine with it. But im also getting this error

Fatal error: Call to a member function query_read() on a non-object in /home2/grastyz/public_html/login_inc.php on line 149

And heres my code for lines 148-151

// get total number of threads and posts
$getstats = $db->query_read('SELECT threadcount, replycount FROM ' . TABLE_PREFIX . 'forum');
while ($forum = $db->fetch_array($getstats))
{