First:
You don't ned SSL to encrypt or use encrypted passwords on your database. (BTW the encryption used by Secure Servers are NOT under your control anyway).
Second:
Your PHP should be installed with the modules needed to use MD5 or crypt(). If you have both, you can use whichever you want. I do prefer crypt() because I can use a text "seed" to generate the encription that, but maybe there's nothing special about it.
To use encrypted passwords you should:
1.When register a new user, encrypt the user password and store it that way in the database.
2.In your login form, define it's action to a login evaluation page. In that page:
3.Encrypt the password that the visitor just wrote using the same encrypt method you used in the registering process.
4.Get the password that is stored in your database for that user.
4.Compare the two strings, if they match, let him/her in. If not... well, you know what to do hehehe
5.Put a sleep() of 1 second or so before get back to the input form in case psswords do not match. This little delay is almost not noticeable for a human being, but in case someone try to use a brute force progy to get access to your restricted area, this 1 second delay could make this wannabe hacker process take days or even weeks.
Be aware that this method is far different from use a SSL connection, and that despite the encryption process, in a normal server all comunication between your users and the server is in plain text.
