options for password protecting a site

I am building a site for a family reunion and want to password protect it because they are worried about personal sensitive information being available.

What are my options? I dont know if this is the correct area to post in so please correct me if I am wrong!

Thanks in advance for any help. I am excited to have found this forum!

You can have it so users must login to see the information; you can have a general first page with asks a user to enter a password which will then direct them to the rest of the site (which can be circumvented if somebody can guess/figure out where the page is redirecting too); you can find out if they'll only be accessing it from home, find out their IPs (and hope they're static) and only allow those IPs that match entry;

I'm running out of ideas

So do I have to use a password generator to get the coding to add to that first page and redirect? Any advice on actually getting that setup? I have been doing the site with basic html and learning as I go.

well there are a few ways to tackle this ... the two that stand out the most to me are the following ...

In your control panel you can password protect files that are on the host and you can set a username/password, and that will be the same for each visitor that enters the site.

Alternatively you can use server side scripting to do the whole password thing ... something like PHP, ASP.Net, or something similar ... it also depends on what type of host you have ... does your host support PHP? or does it support ASP.Net? or does it support none of the above?

Or you could just use a CMS like Drupal, Joomla, or Wordpress.

My first question would be is where are you hosting this? Is this on an existing site that you already have established, or one that you've purchased and are planning to use exclusively for the reunion site (and if so what flavor of server is it, Linux, Windows?), or is this going to be on a "free" hosting server somewhere, such as myspace, or freewebs?

About members... you can have it this way (The way most password protected sites are used) It involves PHP so make sure your host provides PHP hosting. If you really want, I can create the PHP side of the scripting for you if you don't know it and too lazy to learn it (I got bunch of time on my hands).

Create a registration form and in it you can have each of your family members register with their own username and their desired password. So only they know the password and no one else.

Then you will/can have a log in form that, when filled in, takes the information filled in from the database (generally checks if it exists and if it does, the user is logged in). You have SESSIONS that store certain information about that user, such as his/her username and time of log-in.

Than on pages that you need to be only for members you check if the SESSION is set and if it is, than the user is obviously logged in and that user can view that page, and if the user is NOT logged in then no session would be registered (there) than that user cannot see that page and redirected to the log-in page.

Pretty easy to implement once you get to know PHP well enough.

Bogey that's spot on, but maybe for this site a registration form won't be necessary because it's only going to be family and otherwise someone outside of the family could also register and then view the information that is protected ... maybe setting up each user beforehand and just giving him/her the option to change a password would be better ...

Also, it's not just PHP that can do this, there are other alternatives aswell, PHP is just the free alternative ... and usually PHP hosting is cheaper that ASP hosting ... but I know that there are other ways of doing this than just PHP and ASP.Net, I just don't know much about them ...

Depending on how many users are going to be using it, it may be easier to just set up multi-user accounts, such as sorting by last name (where a whole family has one name/pass) or just creating one user/name password for everybody to use. Then you don't even need a database

Hellz yeah! ... that's the best option imo ... so then the coding also decreases by quite a hefty amount

wow ... easy ... and it'd work like a bomb for a site like that ...

Guys are you actually reading what the poster is telling you?



I seriously doubt she is going to want to learn a programming language to do this.

2beeseygirls, trespasser already gave you the easiest method earlier.

Use your host's control panel (CPanel) to password protect the directory where your reunion site will be located, then pass that info to the family members who will access the site when you give them the URL (They will all use the same access to get in). If your host doesn't use CPanel, there should be an alternate means provided to password protect a directory. Check with your host for how they handle it.

From what I understand it seems you just need to protect the community information from outsiders. In such case a simple .htaccess protection (google for it) should do the work

I don't think they want to mess around with more technical stuff...

And me in the very first reply of the thread...

Yes this is 100% possible with Joomla.