I had a similar experience not too long ago. I'm not overly fond of PHP and had already begun working on other aspects of the site in NodeJS. My solution was t

I had a similar experience not too long ago. I'm not overly fond of PHP and had already begun working on other aspects of the site in NodeJS. My solution was to rely on Vanilla Forums for user management and authentication. They also have a pretty nice minimal theme designed for embedding in other applications. I created a quick and dirty NodeJS plug-in for mimicking Vanilla's cookie hashing so that cookies could be read and validated from Node. It's worked out well.