building a membership site

[tmock5]

Hi,

I am in the process of building a website that enables people to sign up as members and be able to access information that non-members would not. also, I want the members to be able to customize their homepage to show the different articles, tools, a timeline that helps them monitor their action plan, etc.

I am using dreamweaver 8. I have several sites on ipowerweb.com and like them. But, if others suggest another host that would be better for this application let me know.

My question is, how do i design my site to enable users to join and be able to customize their home page with content that they help build? any resources would be great.

I am a fast learner, but not currently extremely knowledgeable about code.

[Compguy Pete]

oh your talking about a CMS (Content Management System).

To put this in the simplest of terms I suggest that rather than reinventing the wheel go and take a look at the multitudes of them on the web alread. Most of the ones worth using have great community support for addons and plugins.

PostNUKE, PHPNuke, Drupal, geeklog, joomla, phpWCMS, php Website and the list goes on... but those are the major ones I know off the top of my head.

Also that knowledge about code will come in handy to modify the coding to suit your needs.

Overall the time spent into modifying one of these CMS's is going to save you time headache and testing.

[tmock5]

Thanks for the info.

So, in order to enable users to make a profile and update their own personalized content i will use a CMS.

My web host has PHPnuke available for installation already, so i will probably use them. I have not used PHPnuke. Is it relatively easy to grasp or should I hire it out?

I'll download it and give it a try. thank you again.

[Compguy Pete]

oh PHPNuke has everything you need to do the site right.

Biggest thing is to think outside the box... if your looking at plug-ins think of other uses for them beyond what they're listed to do. For instance something that's for showing a random quote could also be configured to show random user information.