Creating 'member area' of website. (SOLVED)

Spectral Swallow

So I'm looking to expand my business and give customers in real life access to exclusive web content. The problem I'm having is every tutorial or script I've seen goes WAAAY above and beyond what I'm looking for.
Basically I'm looking for something where I assign a username / password, then they log in and are able to access certain pages. If they try to go to the page without being logged in, it boots them back to the login page.

I've tried searching through membership scripts and a number of php logins, but they all seem to either have users specify a name, password, email, etc. Or they let you see the page even without the login (if you have the web address).

Any help is greatly appreciated.

Junpei

I'm a little confused here, do you want users to be able to register themselves or do you want to set up the user itself based on their request?

Creating a login system with at least some security is not a horribly complicated thing, PHP is very capable in this regard. If you can set out clearly what you want from the system a number of people here should be able to help you. My PHP is a bit rusty since I've been working in ColdFusion for so long now

supabeast

I've tried searching through membership scripts and a number of php logins, but they all seem to either have users specify a name, password, email, etc.

How else would you restrict access? And besides, if you’re selling access to your customers you need to make them use user accounts so that you can track what they do and use that to further develop your business around it.

It sounds like you need to move your web site to a CMS like Wordpress or Drupal that’s designed for this sort of thing.

Disrupter

Yeah. Wordpress is probably your best option for an easy solution. Its a good "non programers" CMS that can slowly hold your hand as you get deeper and deeper. There are plenty of plugins for restricting member content. You can either have folks register themselves or manually set up accounts and send an email when you do.

Scooter

Yea, I've played around with Plone, a python CMS, but it's a little resource heavy for most uses. In any case, no need to build something from scratch yourself.

Spectral Swallow

I kept an eye on this thread and tried wordpress (not what I was really looking for), but I DID find a nice php script at:
http://www.phpnerds.com/article/using-cookies-in-php/2

That works exactly how I need it. I put in the names and passwords and they can only access pages if they're logged in. It probably wouldn't work for most other situations, but I totally get that my request was kinda weird.

Bowen

That's a really rudimentary one but that's about the skinny for how it works.