Are you talking about being directed to the forum after login? If so then you can set up a redirect on the login and registration panel in the forum admin/Components.

No, i want a link that i can use elsewhere on my site that will take you direct to the login screen

but not the wp login screen??  the forum inline login form (which is really just the wp login repackaged) is on every forum page since its in the forum header…  so you can link to any of them..

if you want one to the main forum page, there is one offered via our template tags plugin… more info:  http://codex.simple-press.com/codex/plugins/our-plugins/the-template-tags-plugin/template-tag-forum-home-link/

afraid we have no option currently for the login form to show open by default.   you could achieve that though if you edited the css of your sp theme for the #spLoginForm and removed the display:none from it. Or on page load could use jquery to click that ID and cause it to open…