The site is for a school on a MUD. The MUD in question is lensmoor, at lensmoor.org, not that it matters. One of its features is that players can teach other players. So, I set for myself the goal of cataloging all of the teachers, and what they can teach. But it's a bit more complicated than that.
People tend to be a bit paranoid about letting the world know what they can teach and what they can't, because if you're trying to knock them off, and you have a list of every skill and spell they know, you can figure out what exactly their strengths and weaknesses are.
So... I get to design a web site that will not only catalog all of the teachers and what skills they can teach, but it has to limit who can see their list of teachables to only members of their (race | class | religion | etc.) Or, in some cases, only a single other player (or a list of players) for those who only want their apprentices to be able to see what they can teach. Which means passwords, sessions, cookies, user authentication, yadda yadda.
Which is when I cry for help. I've never even built a web site before, much less had to design a relational database to hold all of this information, a site layout that makes sense, is easy to use, but still secure, and so forth. On top of that, there seems to be a million different ways to do the exact same thing- CGI, Perl, Java, bla bla bla bla bla.
So, for those willing to help, I appreciate it. I guess what I'm asking for is someone to say "For authentication, use this technology. To keep track of sessions, use this other thing. And while you're at it, here are a few tips I've learned on how to do such-and-such." And that's... about it, I think.
