Members portion of the site.

[thewindmaker]

Hi there all,A few questions not sure how hard or easy they are for you guys. Or if you will understand it but I'll do my best.I have a site, and forums. However right now we are on invisionfree.com and Frankly I feel like we could use new forums. I would also like to encorperate a Members section of the site, so that when you log in after registering you then gain access to all content (Wallpapers, downloads Ect).I would like to have both of the 2 connected so that your one account is used for both the site and the forums. Any suggestions would be greatly apprechiated. As well keep in mind that I know nothing of CMS or what it even stands for. So if that is what this requires any links to a site which will teach me how to use CMS would also be great.Thanks Alot!!!

[astralaaron]

Hi there all,A few questions not sure how hard or easy they are for you guys. Or if you will understand it but I'll do my best.I have a site, and forums. However right now we are on invisionfree.com and Frankly I feel like we could use new forums. I would also like to encorperate a Members section of the site, so that when you log in after registering you then gain access to all content (Wallpapers, downloads Ect).I would like to have both of the 2 connected so that your one account is used for both the site and the forums. Any suggestions would be greatly apprechiated. As well keep in mind that I know nothing of CMS or what it even stands for. So if that is what this requires any links to a site which will teach me how to use CMS would also be great.Thanks Alot!!!

CMS stands for Content Management Systemunfortunatly that is all I know to help you with I am trying to learn the same stuff.

[pulpfiction]

Some information about CMS.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Content_management_systemCheck out this site which has demo of available CMS to get ideas of what kind you might need.....http://www.opensourcecms.com/

[justsomeguy]

This is a custom programming job, I seriously doubt you are going to find something online that will integrate everything for you like you want.There are really only a few things. First, once you get a forum installed, whichever one you choose, you will need to look in the login or authentication code for the forum and see how they check if the user is logged in. They probably check in the session for something with a specific name, so you need to know what that is, and then do the same database lookup or whatever the forum does to check that the user exists. So the first step is to figure out how the forum checks if the user is logged in, and duplicate that. You will need to add that checking code onto whatever page you want to be protected, so that each protected page can check that the user is logged in before giving them access. If you want to keep track of member statistics, or have some sort of site members where you are keeping track of your own user information in addition to whatever the forum is keeping track of, then you will need to have your own user database that will store the additional information, like what files they have downloaded or whatever.If you are interested in hiring someone to do this for you, send me a private message with all the details you can think of and I can give you a quote.

[Mr_CHISOL]

You could also use Joomla!, it's a nice, easy-to-use CMS with member-logins etc.There's a lot of different extensions for Joomla!, for example forums and "downloading" components (take a look under extensions). There's also a component called CommunityBuilder, it makes building a community a bit easier than doing the installing of the different parts yourself (I think it have a forum that comes with it).I really like Joomla! it easy to use, one downside is the lack of "custom gruops" (you have three levels on the frontend and three levels on the backend..)Good Luck and Don't Panic!