help needed: integrate tank_auth into my website

[eluser]lolmann[/eluser]
hello,

i've tested and liked the (tank) <a href="http://codeigniter.com/wiki/The_Auth_Library/">auth library</a>.

i am fairly new to ci but have read the user guide and understood the principles of mvc programming.

still, i struggle with some basic issues and one of them is integrating the auth library into my website.

the library comes with a controller. when i call it like this http://localhos/auth it works just fine. it displays a login form, logs me in, end so on.

but how do i use the power of the library without calling the controller /auth?

say, i have a website that displays a little login form at the top of each page. creating the form in html is no problem but auth actually needs some data (for example, the variable $login_by_username) in order to determine whether a user can login by username or only by email. how do i get this data?

i get that i have to somehow load the tank_auth library in my main controller which I did ($this->load->library('tank_auth') but it doesn't solve the problem.

can anybody help?