Password-Protecting Web Pages

Although Dreamweaver lets you create web pages that let others add, edit, and delete records from a database, your e-business wouldn’t last very long if just anyone could remove orders from your online ordering system or view credit card information stored in your customers’ records. And certainly your company’s executives wouldn’t be happy if someone got into the staff directory database and changed the boss’s title to Chief Bozo. For these and other reasons, Dreamweaver provides a simple set of tools to lock your pages from prying eyes.

The User Authentication server behaviors can password-protect any page on your site. With this feature, you can limit areas of your site to registered users only, let customers access and update their contact information, create maintenance pages accessible only to administrators, or personalize pages with customized messages (“Welcome back, Dave”).

To password-protect pages on your site, you need to get several elements in order:

  • A database table containing the authorized users’ login information.

  • A registration form for adding new users to the system. (This is an optional step, but it’s frequently useful when you want to automate the process of adding user login information to the database.)

  • A login form.

  • One or more pages you need to password-protect.

The Users Table

To password protect your web pages, your database must hold several pieces of information about the people who can access those secret pages. For example, ...

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