I am surprised no one answered me.. I think I found my own answer you can let me know if I am right..
The answer is to pick up a book on php & mysql. both language & Database are free.. FREE... Whoopie, Yeah, Hoorah! (after already donating about $500 dollars to my troop to do this volunteer project this is good.)
I went out & picked up the php5 & mySQl bible.. (now I am not sure that was the best choice, but it had excercises in website registration & password protection. So when I am thru reading it I hope it will help me understand that which I want to use it for.
This morning, I spent time researching the phpbb website, I keep looking at their mod support, & templates and I saw all this code, but it never stated where to put the code.. & there was nothing about registration page modifications. It took a while (and visiting a link to relise php was a programming language code.. Light dawns on marble head slowly after tossing & turning and being up all night worring how I was going to pull this off)
I did know of mySQL, but I always thought I needed to learn java to work with it & me and java are just not seeing eye to eye.. So this afternoon, armed with the knowledge I wanted to look at books on php & mySql, I visited the bookstore, looked at some of the examples and reading the code I could interpret it, before even starting to learn it.. A very good sign.. If I can understand the code that I am readding, I can learn the code.
But, when I looked at a page that said php is free, & mySql is free for what I want to use it for, I was ready to buy the book! Sold..!! Let's hope this is the turning tide on my luck with this project..!!!
Wenda
There's no doubt you answered your own question.
PHP and MySQL are the great level playing field of this century.
With PHP and MySQL you can set up a pretty nice authentication scheme, with varying levels of access.
If you have an Apache server, you can use .htaccess to do the same also, although the PHPMySQL solution is more robust because it allows registration.
