Question about User loggins from an idiot

[Webstuck]

Hi there.

I really need some help. I'm trying to set up a pretty basic website but it needs to have a few pages thats can only be accessed by customers who register and login.

It's just a basic user loggin system (no user specific content) but I'm totally clueless as to how to do this, ive tried google for help but i keep hearing different and conflicting answers. Some say PHP some say My SQL some say AJAX i've never used any of these and so im a little bit confussed.


Can anybody make any suggestion as to where i should be looking or point me in the right direction.

Thanks Sally xx

[Perad]

So you want each user to have an individual account?

If this is the case you will need to use PHP to interact with the database and MySQL to store the information

As for doing this you need a couple of things.

A register script,
A user area so they can change things like their e-mail address,
A login script
Pages with user authentication.

The last one could be a simple is-logged-in function which checks for an active session.

There are lots of systems around which will do this for free, if you google user authentician script you should find quite a few. I recommend you check out codewalkers for a tutorial. (http://codewalkers.com/tutorials/82/1.html) This will take you through the concepts and get you going.

[Webstuck]

Thanks for your pointers. I will go through the tutorials and hopefully gain a better understanding of the concepts.

Would you say its a pretty easy thing to set up.
Creating user logins, to access restricted webpages sounds pretty basic, but is the reality somewhat different? Also do you know of any good books that have walkthrough guides.

Thanks for your help
Love Sally xx

[gustava32]

if you go to this link http://www.intranetjournal.com/php-cms/ and check out Part 5 there is some pretty good stuff on security.

Cheers,
Gareth

[masonbarge]

Originally Posted by Webstuck

Thanks for your pointers. I will go through the tutorials and hopefully gain a better understanding of the concepts.

Would you say its a pretty easy thing to set up.
Creating user logins, to access restricted webpages sounds pretty basic, but is the reality somewhat different? Also do you know of any good books that have walkthrough guides.

Thanks for your help
Love Sally xx

You're way too young to remember Senor Wences, who was a ventriloquist/comedian. His sense of humor was quite strange.

Anyway, to this day I remember a line from one of his routines. He was Spanish, so you have to imagine this with a deep accent:

Wences: Is difficult.
Johnny: Is easy.
Wences: Difficult.
Johnny: Easy.
Wences: Dee-fee-cult.
Johnny: Deefeecult for you. Easy for me.

For a skilled and experienced php programmer, this is cake. For someone who doesn't know any php, it may be possible to copy/paste a script, but you're asking for a nightmare. Learning trapeze without a net.

I've tried copying/pasting some php scripts, and really, except for helpful snippets, I spend so much time on them I might as well have written them from scratch.

My suggestion, if you want to do this, is to learn enough PHP to at least have a solid understanding of security. My first text was "PHP and MYSQL for Dynamic Web Sites" by Larry Ullman, which ends with construction of a membership capability. I'd suggest working through his book as one good approach. It's how I started and I was very happy with it. The one weakness is his introduction to pure mysql, which can be supplemented either from internet materials (free but time-consuming) or a second text (faster but $$). Actually you could buy a used mysql text for earlier versions quite cheap -- the code you learn should work pretty much 100%. (For php, on the other hand, you really need to learn the version you will be using.)

I'm getting some proficiency at it and I'm actually writing a membership program right now. It's fairly challenging for me even after having done a practice set of programs, but when I'm done, I'll know every nuance of my system and be able to improve it as I continue to learn.

Hope this was helpful. One other thing -- for me, learning php/mysql has been just plain fun. Wait until you find out you can generate .jpg's and .png's with php -- I have to stop myself from wasting time drawing fractals! (With the new gd library, you could theoretically paint a pretty good Mona Lisa using php!)

[cullinanweb]

another more basic method (if u host on apache) is look up .htaccess security or go here http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess3.shtml

[Accurax]

http://www.phpfreaks.com there are two seperate articles in the "tutorials" section, there extremely good and have forums to back them up, this is where i figured it out from.