poor man's integration to smf?

[wakewatcher]

[not sure which board this should go in]
I've got condominium association forum built around smf.  The condo has another website as well.  Its pretty terrible and I want to replace it with cmsms.  Other than the home page I'd like the stuff private and only accessible to those that have valid accounts on the companion smf site. So.... I was wondering if it was possible to have pages in cmsms look at a session variable and validate before rendering.  The easy part I'm guessing is setting a session variable on the smf login.  Is it possible to make page templates that have PHP in them so that I could check for a valid session variable (The session variable would be a timestamp less than say an hour old) if it's set and correct continue painting the page else bail out?  Is something like that possible or is there an easier/better way.

[jpatti]

Install the Front End User module.

[wakewatcher]

Thanks but I don't see how that helps.  Wouldn't that just then require my users to sign-in twice?  Once for cmsms and then for smf?  What I'm trying to do is require only one login.  The users will not need to add content to cmsms but just access it after they have logged in to smf.