Advice Needed...

[toml7379]

Hi all.

I am currently working on a new website. The site needs to have a members area i.e. so people can log in and view preferences etc. It also needs to be capable of allowing users to 'rate' items of media (eg. star rating out of 5)

Now the thing i want to know is what knowledge do i need to achieve this? I am capable of producing static sites but nothing else really, but im willing to learn. Is it CSS? I honnestly have no idea!

Also would a site like this have greater hosting requiremets?

Any advice would be greatly appreciated

Tom

[rob2009]

Sounds like a job for PHP. You should actually be able to find a good script that is capable of doing this, but you still need to learn as much as you can.

CSS is just style sheets, they change the way a page looks. I dont think thats gonna help you too much...lol

[akula]

what you need to do is:

1) get a webhost
2) download the software from pligg.com
3) install the software on your webhost and you're done

[toml7379]

awesome, thanks guys. I'll try pligg.com. In the meantime i'll read up on php, probably be good to learn it anyway. Any other suggestions anyone?

[artistport]

There is another option which would be simple html coding being added to the members page html file. This is not complicated but I would try some software first.

[exstatic]

Also, have a look at Joomla.. that might be able to help you out.. has everything you need and is great to use.

[john82]

Also check with rvsitebuilder or look a hosting services that provide this tools.

[Nick R]

Let me just say 1 thing, you can not build a site securely on just HTML. You need some sort of backend programming to check user authentication. Otherwise anybody could access the members area. As well as the fact that it would take a lot more work, and you couldn't have a ratings system, comments system, dynamic pages etc.

[jackson11]

u need help iam a nice advicer

[chaunna]

I agree with Joomla....

my husband and I run a membership site and we use joomla. Its customizable, and has all the features ur looking for.

We've also built loads of other joomla sites for our customers... pm me if you need some tips on what extensions to install.

Best of luck,
Chaunna

[Stephen Lowe]

Hi Tom
Managing user information (like a user name, a password, and possibly preferences) generally means using a database on the backend (web server) side of the equation. This complicates hosting, because most (all?) free hosting sites don't provide database support. I expect you'd also find a database useful for managing (tabulating and averaging, for example) the ratings of the media items. Since I imagine the media items coming and going, or at least being added to, on a regular basis, storing content about the media items in the database, and generating html from those database entries, provides a low-maintenance way of continually updating a website.
However, between the database and the .html or .php that the user views and interacts with in the browser, there needs to come some kind of script. There are all sorts of options here, depending on the nature of the webserver, your comfort with scripting, and a number of other things...for example, (to throw some acronyms out) it could be done with Javascript and JDBC, or ASP.NET, or serverside with any number of programming languages.
Ok, here's a disclaimer. I work for Microsoft (my opinions, however, are entirely my own). SharePoint, a Microsoft product, would be my choice for an industrial strength community driven web site. But for reasons of price and hosting (you'd need to subscribe to hosting through another party or have your own server, static IP address, and Sharepoint license), I admit this may not be the most sensible initial solution for your project. If you are interested, a web search on SHAREPOINT should bring up both technical information and hosting resources.
I guess this could be a bit daunting if you're not at least partly interested in the technology for its own sake. On the other hand, completing a project like this would demonstrate some very marketable technical skills that you'd presumably acquire along the way. I got into programming doing something similar, just following an idea I wanted to see implemented.
Stephen Lowe
Microsoft ISV Architect Evangelist