Hi all

 

Please bear with me with this one as I am what you would probably consider a noob.

 

First of all I hope this is being posted in the correct area :s

 

I have a website all designed in photoshop, through some carefully navigated tutorials I know how to transfer this to Dreamweaver. But what I want from my site is for people to be able to login and have their own pages which is searchable.

 

For now I just want to get the user login correct. If I had to compare it to something I suppose it would be like facebook (The sites nothing like facebook id like to add) in the way that when you sign up you get the oppotunity to add a few personal details and images.

 

How possible is this for a newb? Is there anywhere that could help reach this level?

 

Any help or pointing in the right direcion would be great

 

Thanks

 

Adam

Hi Adam, do you have any php experience? If not this is going to be quite a challenge for you, but not impossible.

 

Online tutorials are generally OK and plentiful but nothing beats a quality book and I can't recommend PHP 6 and MySQL 5 - Larry Ullman enough.

It starts you off with the important basics. You then setup some awesome error reporting that will save you hours of pain.

Before you know it, you'll have a config file created, database connection and will be well on your way to creating a secure login using sessions.

 

This book opened the door for myself and the others I have also force fed it to

Yeh it sounds like you need to start learning a server sided programming languages such as PHP or ASP.NET and how to use and interact with a database (such as a MySQL database).

 

It depends how robust/secure you need to build the system. There are plenty of tutorials out there for making login areas such as : http://www.phpeasystep.com/workshopview.php?id=6 but not alot of them are very secure.

 

This will look a bit scary if you don't know anything about PHP but it's considered an easy language to grasp.

Hi Adam,

To do this a basic level of PHP is a must, and further more so is an understanding of PHP Sessions.

 

In order to achieve something along these lines you'd need;

 

HTML Login Form (With Username/Password Fields) > PHP Application (Which checks the details with those in a user database) > If they match create a "PHP Session" (I.e. a secure session whereby they are "logged in") > Forward them to their unique members area dynamically created.

 

Additionally a registration app would also be needed.

This of course is just a low level explanation, there are other elements to it aswell, fairly simple but critical. Things such as Encryption of Data (I.e. Passwords and Database Content) and "Cleansing" - which removes illegal and dangerous characters from the text fields which could be used to hack and compromise security.

 

It's not something I'd recommend you try and do without expertise, in the mean time have a read over W3 Schools, they're very useful for beginners and quite comprehensive in detail.

 

Though, have you thought about hiring? Simple job like this wouldn't cost you that much, maybe £50 for a simple system that get's the job done.

Hi all

 

Thanks for the replies, I never thought that hiring someone for this type of job would be so reasonable. I will definatly consider this as an option. I would like the skills to design a technical website though so in the mean time I will read over the w3's pages and if I feel this is something I can easily grasp then may as well purchase the book too.

 

I appreciate you all taking the time to reply as Im sure you get loads of these 'Im new to webdesigning....' posts

 

I have previously just copied and pasted some guys script but it was very basic and without knowing what he was doing it seemed a bit of a cop out.

I'd learn about PHP; loads of tutorial sites out there.

 

Some tips:

 

1. Learn how to structure PHP scripts

2. How to collect form variables in a PHP script (from the html form to the php script)

3. How to validate the data from the form variables

4. How to read and write cookies

5. How to encrypt data (md5 hash, salt keys etc.), you should never store a password but instead an encrypted key which allows you to validate a users password by regenerating and matching the keys.

6. Learning about sessions is also useful for logins but not actually essential if you are just starting out; I would say figure out how to do it with cookies first and then give sessions a go.

5. How to encrypt data (md5 hash, salt keys etc.), you should never store a password but instead an encrypted key which allows you to validate a users password by regenerating and matching the keys.

 

 

I agree entirely but i'd avoid MD5, SHA1 (or any of it's derivatives) are far more appropriate.

True, didnt think about sha1's.

Just come back to give out some plus ones.

 

Ive read through the pages on PHP on the W3 Schools website and I didnt realise that it doesnt take a lot of code to produce a form and create tables. Ive read through once and will soon be going back to put it in to practice.

 

Im going to put in an order on that book which was recommended by one member.

 

 

one more question before I go...

 

I can see how PHP is great for databases, so what I require for User Authentication would be one use for it and Id imagine if you were to set up a shop online it would be used but what other devolpment features would PHP be used for?

PHP and any other server side programming language have a huge amount of uses:

 

You can use it for Shops, Content Management Systems, Customer Relationship Management, Members Areas, Forums, Polls etc.

Im going to put in an order on that book which was recommended by one member.

You won't regret it Awesome book

 

 

 

I can see how PHP is great for databases, so what I require for User Authentication would be one use for it and Id imagine if you were to set up a shop online it would be used but what other devolpment features would PHP be used for?

 

Just a few things:

• Managing user accounts
  
• Managing shop products (front end display / backend admin)
  
• Payments
  
• Subscriptions
  
• Product Reccemondations
  
• Statistics
  
• Customer services
  

 

Really, the list only ends when you want it to.

I can't recommend PHP 6 and MySQL 5 - Larry Ullman enough

 

+1 - this is the best book for learning PHP by far. Won't teach you OOP or higher programming concepts, but it'll start you off in the right direction.

Well I ordered the book last night and look forward to working through it.

 

I completed the examples W3 Schools and was able to site up a DB from the PHP fine including tables etc. I has able to update it via a form in a HTML file, but that is about as far as that site gets you.

 

It was good though, there were somethings regarding the syntax that seemed to make litte sence but the book should clear that up.

 

its good to know ive got somewhere to ask questions with helpful answers