General site help/advice

[willsteele]

Okay, this is really more of an "I need opinions and experiences" question than anything else. I've got a site (PHP-MySQL) with basic pages running now. I want to introduce a protected area for users only. Users must subscribe. Ideally, I would like to add the following functions, but am not sure if there are "hidden" pages that need to be considered before I venture onto this project.

Main functions I'm after are:

database storage of user registration info
ability to change username
ability to store personal information on site with a personal "home page" on the inside of this domain
ability to subcribe (via Paypal) and receive electronic registration that requires a new password upon initial entry

Those are the main things. I know this can all be done with a little hard work, but I don't want to create an unsecure protected area and get caught in six months with some avoidable details I overlooked simply for lack of awareness.

I downloaded the PayPal manual (https://www.paypal.com/en_US/pdf/PP_WebsitePaymentsPro_IntegrationGuide.pdf ) for developing their ecommerce applications and have been reading through it. Due to a general lack of experience with that side of things, I am a little tentative on exactly how to approach the problem.

At present the site is up and running. This will be an addition only once I am sure it is fully functional and worth the trouble.

Thanks,

Will

[baffled_in_UK]

I have developed many sites that use this kind of functionality.

I use sessions to control site access. A session value is checked and if it is not set then the user is sent to a login page.

As far as browser security goes, using SSL is good but not absolutely vital unless you are hoping to hold financial details. If you are going to hold financial details (ie. credit cards) then you should encrypt the values before storing them.

The kind of info you want is too long for a forum thread in truth, if you send me a PM I'll throw you a load of code and see if you can make sense of it.

[willsteele]

I know this type of question is not something that can be effectively answered in a forum, but I was just hoping to get a nod in some general direction.