Sharing persistent php session between website and IPB forum

Question

I got a question regarding the cross-site session/cookie sharing between my website and the ipb forum on my server.

My question is to ask if it's possible to create a persistent PHP session that can be used on my website and my IPB forum.

Would it just be enough to create a session object after confirming the login and store the session values into my IPB forum database?

I currently use this code for a validation of the user and creating a php session for it:

if ($this->authenticateMember($result_row->members_pass_salt , $md5_once_password , $result_row->members_pass_hash)) {

                    // write user data into PHP SESSION
                    $_SESSION['name'] = $result_row->user_name;
                    $_SESSION['email'] = $result_row->user_email;
                    $_SESSION['user_login_status'] = 1;

    function authenticateMember($salt, $password, $md5_hash){

    if ( $md5_hash == self::generateCompiledPasshash( $salt, $password) )
    {
        return true;
    }
    else
    {
        return false;
    }
}

/**
 * Generates a compiled passhash.
 * Returns a new MD5 hash of the supplied salt and MD5 hash of the password
 *
 * @param   string      User's salt (5 random chars)
 * @param   string      User's MD5 hash of their password
 * @return  string      MD5 hash of compiled salted password
 */
function generateCompiledPasshash( $salt, $password)
{
    return md5( md5( $salt ) . $password);
    }

I'm sure it's possible to do so, but I'm a bit baffled when I look at how IPB creates a session, since it uses so many variables across the board.

So if some of you got some tips on how to handle this, that would be greatly appreciated.