I viewed http://www.gidforums.com/t-887.html in my effort to add authentication for visitors of pages in a specific folder at our non-profit site. As a bit of a noob, I'm not entirely clear on these points:

1. Where does the "engine" script go, and what should the script be called?
2. I'm likewise unclear on the "secret" pages, whether they're both required, and what they do, and where they go.

Can anyone help or point me to a tutorial?

With much gratitude ... !

Anywhere, it can be saved anywhere... It can be renamed to anything. For example, you could name it login.engine.php and you could save the file to:

/home/denis/test_dir/login.engine.php


These are simply example pages ... There could have been one or many more (you get to decide). They could be named anything. The important thing is that they all include the lines:



Ask again if you still need help.

I have created the scripts as .php files and corrected the paths where they appear. Now that I understand that a "secret" file just means that it's a protected file, it would also help to know how I can add that code to my existing protectable files. For example, do I incorporate the lines into existing .shtml pages and rename them?

And the most important thing is how do visitors register under their own chosen passwords? Presumably that's what should happen? I don't see anything that seems to provide for this.

Thank you again.

Nobody has responded to this, so it's hard to know whether others have actually had success with this script.

Since I haven't had this working, I again ask how a visitor registers so that he can be authenticated. I gather some kind of data file must be created to store names and passwords. How else can this script (or any script) confirm that someone is allowed to access a protected page?

I didn't reply with an example because everybody has different ways of storing their membership data. In other words, one example may not work for you, especially if you want something that you can just copy and paste and have it work on your site.

If you give me some ideas what you will be storing and an indication how much you know about MySQL (creating dbs, tables and querying), then I can (maybe) suggest a script or 2.

Our data is very small and very simple. At best -- and this is pushing it -- we'd have 150 usernames and passwords. I don't know anything about MySQL, but of course I have access to the table setups and can probably work my way through it.

No, it doesn't matter how many members you have in your database.

We are interested in the (db) table layout. If you can paste that here, I can write an example script tailor-made for your table structure.

It will help you understand the steps better...