livelyretro

Hey all! First off, thanks for all the help you've already given me. You guys are awesome, and everytime someone asks me if I know of a good web host, I tell them about you. Anyway, I'm trying to design a website with information about my upcoming wedding. I would really like for the directory this site will reside in to be password protected, because I don't feel the whole world needs to know all the details of how we met, when and where the ceremony it, etc. The plan is to put the web address and a username and password on the save-the-date cards and invitations - not the most secure way of doing it, but it will work for these purposes. Now, I know that I can use cPanel to password protect a directory, but many of my friends and family are not very computer literate and I know that if some of them type in the address I give them and see a blank page with the password prompt, they will immediately get very confused and think they broke something or it isn't working. So, my question is, is there a way to password protect the directory, but embed the username and password prompt into a regular webpage that I can make look less scary? Thanks so much!

silly me, I KNEW tch servers use PHP, i just wasn't thinking. I guess I'm just feeling overwhelmed by the sheer number of CMS programs out there and trying to pick the right one, and so at the moment it seems easier to just do it myself. I did take a glance at Moodle, but since this is supposed to be a site that will be used outside of the classroom and across school districts I'm not sure it will server the purpose I'm going for. Most people in my class that are using a CMS are using Mambo, but i'm concerned about the security aspect of that - when I installed it on my own page I found that in order for it to work all folders that are used by the program I must chmod to 777, which I know is not generally a good thing.

Thanks everyone, nice to meet you! I've been busy with school, so I haven't had much time to look further into this since my last post, but at this point I'm wondering if it would be easier to build my own system from mainly scratch, and then just use vBulletin for the message board aspect. I've done a lot of pure HTML coding in my time, have some experience with Access so I know pretty much how databases work, and I have some books on xHTML, CSS, Perl, CGI, and Javascript. I also know that w3schools has some good resources to learn ASP. I have a very basic idea of how this would all pull together in my head, but its still very vague and undefined. I'm just wondering which will be a bigger time investment - using and learning one of these premade CMS systems that are often confusing and not straightforward on how to make them work (at least thats the way it seems from playing with Mambo), or learning the necessary skills myself and implementing them?

Hi. I need to design a website that will be used by students/parents/teachers in a major metropolitan area. This is part of a college class project, and we were just thrown in cold and told to get it done. The requirements are: 1) must have ability for users to log in and create a profile -students profiles must be more restricted than parents/teacher profiles for obvious reasons -should be able to classify privlidges based on the type of profile (a.k.a. teachers can submit new content, students cannot) 2) must be able to let students rate various pages based on usefulness 3) must have seperate area for teachers to access to submit new content/general discussion 4) must be able to notify students on site updates based on interests they list in their profile 5) ideally would have area for students to get homework help from teachers I've pretty much figured out that I'll need a CMS (content management system) for this, and I've looked into Mambo and Drupal a little bit, but after installing Mambo I found some security concerns with the CHMOD settings of certian folders, so i'm not sure thats the best idea. Any suggestions at all would be highly appreciated!