novice needs help setting a membership up

[soutie]

Hi All

I'm a home educated website owner, only been doing it for three weeks. I would like to start a free membership for certain areas of the site, so far all I have tried has failed and is very frustrating. Can someone please send me to a user friendly programme, or guide me step for step with it?

[digital-ether]

If you want to write the PHP code yourself, you'll need to learn:

1) How to create HTML Forms.
2) How to have PHP handle HTML form submission.
3) How to connect to a database with PHP
4) Saving data to the database
5) Retrieving data from the database
6) Creating a Login Form and Authenticating Login requests
7) Persist HTTP Requests using PHP Sessions

The other option is to use a CMS, then you'll have to learn how to setup the CMS, and the admin interface of the CMS.

Which would you prefer?

[soutie]

inititially the cms, the php will follow with time.

[digital-ether]

inititially the cms, the php will follow with time.

If your site is a blog site, wordpress ( http://wordpress.org/ ) is really good.
If you have a more general site, Joomla ( http://joomla.org/ ) and Drupal ( http://drupal.org/ ) are the top ones for PHP.

Heres some resources on choosing a CMS:

http://www.cmsmatrix.org/ - select a list of CMSs and cross reference features.
http://opensourcecms.com/ - Try demo's of open source CMS's.