PHP & MySQL Strategy Question 2

[braves07]

I have a little experience in both PHP & MySQL but I've never created a full on site with it. I was just asked to build something that accomplishes 2 things.

1. Collects Users Information and gives them a Login/Password that lets them access their specific account information. (The company wants to input the customer information and give them a login/password)

2. The company wants to be able to keep a customers "status" updated by adding information to specific accounts to show progress. They would also like to email monthly the "current status" of the users product.

My question is... Does anyone have any helpful reading material or helpful tips that will help me accomplish the above? On a scale of 1-10 how difficult is the above?

Thanks,

braves07

 

[ingresman]

That doesn't sound too bad.
Collecting user information and generating passwords etc is done by the majority of ecommece style apps. The microsoft .NET framework 2.0 and above have some very good functionality included out of the box. But if you need to use PHP I'm sure there must be some scripts out there to do it. An hour with google shoud help. Or you could get a php for dummies type book which should have an example. collecting the raw info storing it in the DB is all well and good but you need some kind of maintenance function to suspend users, change passwords etc.
Your second requirement is not too bad either, as long as the update module can assocaite with the user off you go, you need to create tables to support it. A monthy update could be kicked off by cron on *nix or AT on a windows box.
How much programiing expeirnece to you have ? on a scale of 1-10 a php/mysql dev with about 6 month exprience should eat it alive. (sorry don't know if 1 is high or low !)

 

[AdaHacker]

I agree with ingresman: this is not hard. Maybe a 2 or 3 for someone with a year of good PHP experience. With the learning curve, it may be as high as a 5 or 6 for someone with no experience or only "don't know what I'm doing, but hacked together some sites from code I found on the web" experience. Either way, it's certainly "do-able."

For the user login portion, you could look at PEAR::Auth. Or just Google it. Even rolling your own authentication system isn't that hard - there are plenty of tutorials out there on this topic.

For the second part (well, the whole application, really), you might also want to look into one of the many PHP MVC frameworks. There are a bunch out there - CakePHP and Symfony are both popular, and I've recently been looking in to Zend's framework and CodeIgniter. Google will turn up a bunch more. Using a framework can take a lot of the grunt work out of developing an application. If you have a decent grasp of OOP and design patterns, it can save you a significant amount of effort. The down side is that it may be a too much to take in if you're a newbie with little experience in software development.

 

[braves07]

Thanks for the replies... very much appreciated it. This gives me a starting point and good references to research. Thanks again.