John D. Mort wrote: > So my experience with web technologies has been mainly limited to > apache and flat html files with some DOM manipulation with javascript. > I have a hobby I'm working on right now (online D&D game) that I > think could benefit from having a webpage as an information > repository. > > I'm looking to learn how to set up user accounts so that my players > have to sign in to the website, and limiting the content displayed > based on user account. So for instance if someone's character came > from the kingdom of whatever and there was background information > about that place that only a native would know, then when that player > logged in they would have a link pop up to that content, but if a > player didn't have permissions to see that link, then they wouldn't > get the link when they logged in and even if they guessed the url they > would be disallowed to see that content based on the username they've > authenticated with. > > I'm guessing the way to go about this would be to set up > authentication so that they enter a username/password, if the password > matches they get a cookie, then as they click around apache queries > that cookie to determine what content to display. Am I on the right > track here? > > This seems like it should be pretty basic, but my googling is giving > me a variety of responses, from using ASP to using a CMS. I currently > have a LAMP environment, but would be willing to run other programs to > do this. I'm just looking for some pointers on where to learn the > basics to do this sort of thing.
Welcome to the wild world of web app development. :) The fastest way to
probably do this is via a prebaked CMS, as that will already have user
accounts and permissions cooked in.
The I'd go about it is start with a web framework like Rails (PHP Cake
would be the PHP closest equivalent) and build from there. The user
state machine is a pretty easy thing to do in those environments. There
are enough interesting ways to expose user account systems implemented
poorly that I don't think I'd write one from scratch in this day and age.
The thing you need to remember about adding user accounts is that users
will forget their passwords... a lot. So if you don't build a system
that lets them reset them, you'll be doing a lot of that manually.
-Sean
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Sean Dague Mid-Hudson Valley
sean at dague dot net Linux Users Group
http://dague.net http://mhvlug.org
There is no silver bullet. Plus, werewolves make better neighbors
than zombies, and they tend to keep the vampire population down.
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