Developing my site ...Basic questions please ?

quecoder

Hello,
I'm currently developing my site and want to ask some questions :

1 - Users post articles that can be purchased , I want to let the buyer read it without being able to copy it ... article will not be in English , can I make a pic of this article using GD library or so to let him read and not to copy ? if yes , how please ? if no , is there any other means ?

2 - I want to make it secure , there is an Admin panel that I want to protect , members area and other attacks ... can you advice me on how to build them securely please ?

3 - If I want to prevent a user from registering again after banning him , how to decide if he is trying to register again ? ( comparing address infos for example , and if it's not in English ? )

4 - some basic questions on MySQL :
4-1 : If I have 100,000 records , I searched for records with ID = 5 , let's assume there are 100 of them , how much time will that takes ?
4-2 : If I have a field that takes three options ( accept , refuse , on hold ) , can I set it to varchar ?

4-3 : INT length of 3 , how long numbers can be ?

jazz_snob

quecoder wrote:
Hello,
I'm currently developing my site and want to ask some questions :

1 - Users post articles that can be purchased , I want to let the buyer read it without being able to copy it ... article will not be in English , can I make a pic of this article using GD library or so to let him read and not to copy ? if yes , how please ? if no , is there any other means ?

An image might be a good idea. I've seen sites that write all the html as obfuscated javascript, but based on the way your asking these questions I'd say thats way above your skill set. Heck, its above mine.

2 - I want to make it secure , there is an Admin panel that I want to protect , members area and other attacks ... can you advice me on how to build them securely please ?

Have a login using https and use cookie-based sessions. Thats not really a good answer, but then again it is: store sessions in the database. Use cookies. Do not put session IDs in the URL (hence the use cookies). Do it over https so the login info is encrypted when its sent to the server. OK there, its the same answer I originally gave but a little more detail. There is more to this, because all your php should take security into consideration (verifying input values, escaping values before using them in queries, etc).

3 - If I want to prevent a user from registering again after banning him , how to decide if he is trying to register again ? ( comparing address infos for example , and if it's not in English ? )

You might try to base this on their IP address, but really you cannot prevent this.

4 - some basic questions on MySQL :
4-1 : If I have 100,000 records , I searched for records with ID = 5 , let's assume there are 100 of them , how much time will that takes ?

This doesn't make sense. There shouldn't be 100 records with ID=5, there should be only one. If ID is your table's primary key then it should be really quick. How quick in seconds I can't say, but it would be the quickest a query could be because your looking at the primary key and asking for a constant value (5).

4-2 : If I have a field that takes three options ( accept , refuse , on hold ) , can I set it to varchar ?

Yes but if you really only need three values then an enum is probably better:

somecolumn enum('accept', 'refuse', 'on hold') not null default 'refuse';

4-3 : INT length of 3 , how long numbers can be ?

3 integers, -999 to 999.

Xager

4-1 : If I have 100,000 records , I searched for records with ID = 5 , let's assume there are 100 of them , how much time will that takes ?

We're taking about milliseconds, a second tops