Asp Admin section....

[courtjester]

Ok, so I have no idea where to start on creating my own log-in section. So I just stole this off of some other person's site. Then I took that code and edited it a bunch to make it work for me and mine. (of course the admin section inside is all made by me, except a few thigns Dreamweaver threw in thanks to GWX for pointing that out by the way...) I learned the syntax for ASP, but I don't know how to use it. I see how these people did it and I am like ok, I get the coding, but I don't understand the concepts... Is this something only school will teach me? or is there a book I can read?

[spinal007]

here's what I think is the basic idea behind a simple admin site:

1. store your username-password conbinations somewhere (in a database for example), then try finding a matching record.
so:
find record with username='username' and password='password'

if record exists
[save username and other user info to session. you couldt even save things like access level, login time and other things that might be usefull later on]

else
[bug off, u can't come in]



2. to make sure all your admin pages are secure, you could (and you probably have) design a template for your admin pages in dreamweaver. in that template include an ASP file which says:

if session("username")=Empty then ' i.e. not logged in
[send visitor to login page]



3. build up the code to meet your security needs... for example:
instead of:
if session("username")=Empty
you could use:
if session("username")=Empty or Session("logintime")<(Now()-10)
that way, even if the session hasn't expired, the user will have to login again every 10 minutes
and you could also use a similar method if you wanted to have different access levels...


I've gone on so much that I don't even remeber what I was talking about, so I better go...

on the general issue though:
based on my experience, I have never been taught nor read any books. i learnt from sites like this and newsgroups. I support the "learn it by doing it" theory (which I just made up by the way...)

[Webforumz Staff]

See my second post on this thread
http://www.webforumz.com/topic.asp?TOPIC_ID=871

In my opinion there's nothing a school can teach you can't learn on your own.

[courtjester]

Thanks Cata.. I got it to work but had to use Dreamweaver and cheated a little bit... I understand how it did it, but the variables Dreamweaver used is a little strange. lol. But it works now, and it checks to make sure login is true on every page, so you have to log-in to access them. THanks Cata, thanksSpinal.

[spinal007]

ditch Dreamweaver. it will end up taking you to a dark messy side...
and we all know that messy and programming don't really go together.....

I use I plain text editor with a few search/replace tools and that's it. it's my baby!
I wouldn't change it for anything!
:-)

[courtjester]

well, I do ALL my coding in Araneae. But I do use Dreamweaver for stuff like this.. (things I don't know...) But I mostly stick with Araneae. Araneae (to those that don't know...) is awesome. I love it. It's basically like Dreamweaver in Code View. It color codes different parts and has a line counter, and it loads so very quickly. It is my first choice for programming. But when I get stuff like the above I don't know where to start or what to do. I will eventually, (as I have told Rob) create one from scratch and figure it out completely, then make the changes to all my current sites... but at the moment Webdesign is in such high demand for me that I don't have the time to do it that way. Hopefully when things slow down I will have the time to take and hand code this stuff.

[spinal007]

fair enough...
you seem to use Araneae for the same reasons I use MSDE (which is included with MSOffice), so I'm gonna try it out...