creating a secure area for clients

[chanchito]

Good evening,

I was just wondering if anyone has any good tips, ideas, or directions on how I can go about creating a special area for my clients. What I would like would be able to have a login and password section on my home page, and then when the client logs in they would be taken to a dedicated page that is only for them to view (ie- I could have beta versions of their site there and what not). I kow that if I turned my web site into a CMS site that that may open up possibilities, but I really don't like the cluttered confusion that CMS' bring them (or at least the ones that I have seen).

Is this something that would be possible without a CMS?

Any input is greatly appreciated.

Thanks
Chanchito

[aceofspades]

tiki wiki CMS. Or if you want something even more privacy oriented than groupware. They are both very good at having private areas and such. They are both in fantastico.

[chanchito]

thanks for the response. I will take a look into those and see how they are.

I was able to troll through the net and find some referrences to certain programs and whatnot and I took a look at one called LockedArea. It is a memeber management software and allows you to create a members area that requires login/password, as well as being able to have members sign on and create their own username and password. It was a bit of a task getting it installed and working. Since I am only interested in being able to create a directory that requires authentication to access the files this is as far as I took it. I haven't tried the having a user create their own account and what not.

The same company also provides a script for managing your .htaccess and .htpasswd files as well. And from this I was able to achieve the same goal as the more in depth program mentioned above.

I also came across a tutorial that explains how to do the same thing, although it needs you to access your server via telnet. I can chmod my files through my ftp program, but to run a command or anything I don't think I can do that. Is there a way for me to run this script (I believe it is perl) witout having to use a telnet program? Telnet is extremely unsecure so I wouldn't feel comfortable accessing my server with such a medium. The reason I ask is because being able to run that script would be a good thing because the script to run adds more usernames and passwords to your .htpasswd file. The url for the tutorial is http://www.janey.net/tutorials/password.html


cheers
chanchito