Creating php account system with access to several website sections

[WebLike]

Greetings beloved Gurus!

 

I would like some advice on how to go about creating a PHP registration/login system that grants access to all services on a website that has various sections, much like Google; e.g. I have got a Gmail account and subsequently been granted access to all of Google's services like Blogger, Youtube etc.

 

Now I would like to do the same with my website, and grant the users access to all the services with one account registration. I am fairly new to PHP, I have only been tinkering around with it for five months now. I hope my question is not ambiguous or too broad, I need help with how I should approach this, so any pointers with regards to the structure of the database, frameworks, resources, and anything I should take into account would be much appreciated. I am ready to jot down your suggestions.

 

Thank you!

[Ingolme]

The first thing you need to understand is that Google has billions of dollars and thousands of experienced programmers. When you're trying to emulate any of their projects you have to ask yourself if you have the time and resources to imitate something of such a large scale.

 

Fortunately, creating a basic login system for a single website is not too difficult, but the more features you want to add the more difficult it becomes. Before you start any programming at all you need to determine what your requirements are:

1. Do you want protection against brute force attacks?
2. Do you want an account recovery system and if so, how do you want it to work?
3. Does to user have their own profile page?
4. How much information about the user do you want to store?
5. Do you want to keep a log of user activity?
6. Is there protection against spam bots?

 

A CMS is likely to do everything you want from a registration system. There are so many of them out there, like Joomla, Wordpress, PyroCMS or ExpressionEngine and hundreds more. You don't just have to rely on what the CMS has, a lot of content management systems offer APIs which you can use in PHP to customize the way it works.

 

If you don't want to use a CMS the database structure and code for a login system depend very heavily on what your requirements are.