Hello: I've created simple websites in the past but now I'm tasked with creating a webpage that I would like to have people register before they enter. I'm going to host the site on a Linux server through godaddy.com. My goal is to eventually have a site similar to Myspace but it will only be for family members, I envision it being an interactive family tree. But first things first. Right now I'm only concerned with setting up the site so people will have to register first and gain access through a username and password. Once they sign in I would like for them to be able to post to a message board with the same user name and password. In other words I don't want them to have to sign in with one username and password and then get to the message board and have to sign in again. If someone could please point me in the right direction as far as tutorials or books that I should read to understand how to do this I would greatly appreciate it. Some things I don't understand about this is, once people register I want to be able to personally verify that they should have access, how would I do that? Secondly once they have been verified and registered I would like them to be able to change there password if they wanted. Again I'm really just looking for a good place to start learning this. This is going to be a huge undertaking and I want to start out on the right foot. Thanks for all and any help. Q

What taking a look at Godaddy's Linux packages and the languages supported, I would recommend using PHP with a MySQL database. There are some free add-on packs that you may want to look into that may have most if not all of the features you want. I'm not familiar with all thos packages, but PostNuke would be my first start. Michael J

Thanks for the info! Q

That is a large undertaking. My father is into history alot and has asked me to do a similar project with my family tree. I can see myself doing it shortly once my current web projects are finished. I'm not too sure if you are planning to write this yourself or get some publicly available packages and mould them together. If you plan to write it yourself then you will need a fairly good grasp of php and mySQL. If not then there are plenty of free software out there, just combining it together might be abit of a problem. Again it depends on the software. By a message board do you mean a forum or a guest book of some sort? Overall the site idea that you have doesn't seem very complicated. I can provide some help if you wish but I'm afraid I don't have the time to provide advanced help. But I would be happy to answer any questions or provide snippets of code and explain it. (",)