How to create a member's area/sign-up area on site

[Bizmaker1]

Hello,

Are there any kinds of plugins for something like this that will help me create a page where people sign up with their email and generate a unique sign-in id and password?

If not, what's the best way to go about this?

Biz

[Feenz]

You could try one of my muses :
http://www.prophpscripts.com/scripts/user-session-pro

Tutorial here :
http://www.prophpscripts.com/tutorials/how-to-add-a-members-login-to-your-website

User Session Pro, is a set of scripts which install with a wizard, and easily allow you to protect pages / create user levels, registration, lost passwords, etc. All with one or two lines of copy/paste code.

You need a server running PHP though.

I'd love some feedback if you decide to use it.

But if you want to do it yourself :

You need a programming language (like php, asp, perl, etc) installed on your server, and you need to write some code to handle the registration and logins, etc.

The basics of this are :

1) Database of some sort to store the user details.
2) A form to allow people to register, which submits to a page which carries the code. This code will check the registration details to be sure the username is available / all fields were filled in correctly, etc. Then store these details in the database
3) You can decide whether you want to verify their email address, by sending an email with a link in it which carries a code at the end of it in the querystring (the stuff that comes after the ? at the end of urls), which allows you to match this code against one you stored against the user record, so you know that user has access to that email. Read up on security aspects of this.
4) Then you need a login form. When people login, you need to check the database to see if the username / password match, and then one method of knowing if they're logged in from that point onwards is to set some data in their "session" variables, which the server holds for a web user session on the site.
5) When each page loads, check to see if the session variables indicate that the user is logged in or not, and present the page content suitable for either case.

If you've never done it before, it sounds more complicated than it is. But similarly if you've never programmed before, you'll probably be better off using something like the above, or getting a developer to build it for you.

Feel free to PM me if you need any more info.

Cheers

Simon

[Sven]

Drupal cms has that as standard: www.drupal.org

[jakediddy]

Feedburner (www.feedburner.com) is meant for RSS feed management, however you can use it to collect email addresses. If you set up your website with WordPress you can use RSS/email to mass mail your subscribers just by adding posts to your website (you can still add static pages to your site, and you also don't have to display the actual posts on your site).

Not sure of its worth, but I'm going to explore it for my website.

[duncan]

you can google "membership/ subscription software" one good tool is amember

[Dantplayer]

DL Guard has a decent one too; it comes with their standard $150 script.

My fav. is probably The Butterfly Marketing script... Very comprehensive.