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"members Only" Web Site


Lou Sander

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I need to set up a web site that requires a username and password to access. It doesn't need to be secure in a financial way, just accessible by people who have joined up. It needs to be invisible to Google and other searches.

 

This HAS to be easy and/or widely available, but I don't know where to start looking.

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Well not knowing what kind of content you are wanting to put up it can be done with Joomla, Drupal, Xoops or any other content management system as well as putting up a forum that you have to log into to use.

 

Making it invisible to Google or other search engines can be accomplished by creating a robots.txt file denying your site from being listed. Search Google for robots.txt and you will find lots of information on how to construct one.

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It's a web site for a membership organization. We have a site at http://amr1.org, but there's stuff on there that we want to make available to "members only." We DO have an online forum, and we know that forums can be made "private," but at the moment we don't have the critical mass of computer-literate members to make the forum very meaningful.

 

Our "members only" site or area would be mostly for one-way communication to members, including "members only" files to download.

 

I maintain our web site using a very old WYSIWYG program called Cute Site Builder. It serves me well and I'm a power user of it, and not very interested in learning something new, though we can afford to spend a few hundred dollars on software if we need it. I've heard of Joomla(?) and a few of the others, but don't know much about that type of software.

 

Do you have any words of wisdom for me about all this? (Should I look into content management systems? Which one? Etc.)

 

I definitely want to avoid big learning curves -- I've climbed dozens of important ones since 1979, but I'm getting old and weary.

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Any content management system is going to have a learning curve I'm afraid. Several are one-click installs right through Fantastico in cPanel.

 

Yeah, but what do I do after it's installed? I one-click-installed phpMail, then spent days figuring it out and polishing / perfecting my installation. I used it three or four times before I discovered its shortcomings. I'll probably never use it again, though it remains installed and highly polished. It was fun climbing the learning curve, but it was hugely cost-ineffective.

 

These CMS's seem a LOT more complicated than a simple mailing list program, and I need RESULTS, not the fun of climbing the learning curve.

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  • 1 year later...

I'm not sure if I've found the right place to get some help.

I "think" I'm trying to do what the original poster asked but when you start talking about some content management software, you lost me.

I have a web page and I want to set up links to an area that can only be accessed if the person signs up to be a member on that page.

Do I need to use one of those content management programs or is this something I can do if I know how to write the correct codes for doing it?

I use to type all my pages out from scratch using notepad but I just recently started using Microsoft Expression Web 4 so I'm wondering if I can write codes using that program or notepad.

Of course I'd need to know just what I'm suppose to type. Is that where those content managment programs come in?

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I think I'm going to end up tabling the idea of setting up a members only page because it sounds as if it's much more involved then I anticipated.

I went to the Joomla website to see just what that was and if I'm understanding things correctly, it's sounds like it's a hosting company.

Would that mean I have to set up another domain and pay another host to use their software?

That's not something I want to do.

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No, it´s free.

 

You can as well install it from your Cpanels Fantastico section. I know that version 1.5 can be found in Fantastico. Recently, the Joomla people released version 1.7.

However you can try to see with the techs if they can make version 1.6 available for you in Fantastico. If they can, it should be quite easy to upgrade it to 1.7.

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Thanks.

One more question.

When I installed my smf message board for the first time, I used Fantastico and it ended up loading files for every language which I didn't need so I had to manually delete them all.

Does Fantastico do that for all downloads? I really don't want and language other then English since that's the only language I understand.

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  • 1 year later...

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