A friend and I are trying to figure out or find out rather how to give passworded access to certain areas of a website…restricting certain pages from the general public. How do you do this? Any help on this would be very appreciated.
thnx
Ron
[email protected]
hey Ron
it’s usually done with a .htaccess file in the protected directory, which refers to another list of authorized users somewhere on the server
but assuming you or friend are not running your own server, you would have to ask the host-provider how to set this up with password protection – they might already have something set up to assist with it
or if you are running your own web server, Google “htaccess” and “htpasswd”
htacces is not really fleixble though, usually its done by sending headers, sessions, cookies matched to username and password in the database… So you will need someting like PHP on your server, offcourse any other serverside language will do… but php is my favourite :lol:
There are a million login scripts on the web, and allot of tutorials which will explain you how to build them, also in the PHP Anthology book from sitepoint there is a chapter about building ACL (Acces Control List) which is really good. 
If you cannot write scripts and you do not have a clue what MySQL or PHP is then use the .htaccess method. It’s simple and it protects directories/documents from access. It is very secure. The only downside is that you have one user/password combo for everybody. No user management possible.
http://www.javascriptkit.com/howto/htaccess.shtml
Why don’t you run a contents management system. They usually allow the management of up/downloads/users/passwords with graphical user interfaces.
There are nice free ones like php-nuke and xoops and others.
If you need more info: [email protected]
Cheers
LemonNado
If you do decide to go for a CMS dont go for one of the nukes, instead go for something flexible like Mambo, EzPublish, Typo 3