Web Design: Passwording web sites

[nard4637]

Hello everyone I'm new to this site Planet Photoshop and I had a quick question. I'm in school at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh for Web Design & Interactive Media. My question was: Im working on a my own personal web site and will like to know how do you set up passwords for members login? And also have some of the pages viewable by members only? I have the Adobe CS3 Master Collection so I think I have everything needed to do the job. :)

[Jason_The_Adams]

The simple answer is: a database and a language to query the database.

The more complicated answer is: Designing a database is easy and is generally done in one database program or another (i.e. Office Excel, Open Office Calc). The more difficult part (and if you're familiar with programming, it's really not too difficult) is choosing how you want to go about accessing your database - which, I need to mention, has a Table containing your User Name and Password sections. If you're doing a Flash website then you'd do this using Action Script; an AJAX website would use Java or PHP, an ASP site would use ASP... The most common query language to use when accessing the database within your parent language is SQL.

If this is completely new to you, then good luck; it's generally not something one would want to delve into the for the sake of learning as you need to implement it - this is usually not a good method to go about doing things. Otherwise, if this makes at least some sense to you and you have some programming background, then it shouldn't be too difficult.

Also, in the language you're using, you'd simply implement logical (If...Then) statements into the code which produces your site:
If bMember Then Display Member-Only Content
Really not particularly complicated.

Hope this helps.