Sorry, but that's the one area where I cannot, under any circumstances, take it easy. Doing local development, or on a sandboxed school network, sure, there's room for learning the thing one step at a time (just getting a form to do something, then doing the login, then learning ow to authenticate), but on a public-facing server, it's pure danger. And no, one doesn't have to leave things to "corporations"; the features needed to do things correctly are built into the PHP language and alternative secure hashes (such as PBKDF2) are but a Google away.
It really is the case that people are going to use their "real" password, likely the only one they use wherever they can get away with it, on your toy site, and it's by attacking the toy sites that "interested parties" find their way into places where they can do real damage. There's absolutely no room for encouraging poor practice here.