I am interested in giving my users individual login accounts to access secure features of the web site. I'm probably jumping in to deep for my limited experience in these things, so I need some help from you guys. I'm looking to create a user login/tracking setup similar to what Yahoo offers with their chat/games/etc.
Here is what I want to do:
* Site will have login to access personalized areas
* Site will remember returning members (probably through cookies)
* Users will be able to post profiles of themselves that others can see
* Users will be able to log in once to use all site resources:
* BB will recognize users without logging in a second time
* Web Mail will recognize users without logging in a second time
* All other site features (chat, profiles, polls, etc will reference to the users account)
I know this has been done before, and there is probably some free source code out there to do the job. My experience is mainly in page layout and HTML. I know very little about PHP, Javascript, Java, and other scripting languages even though I have included them in past projects.
I'm guessing that I'll need to use some combination of PHP, MySQL, and cookies to pull this off. I don't want to reinvent the wheel. Where do I go from here?