How to create a membership site

Question

I have a website, mostly composed with public links, that is anyone can see them. But I was thinking in creating some pages that could only be accessed by people who were registered on my website.

I looked around and found out that for that I would need a CMS, so I went to my host's CPanel to get one (DRUPAL) but instead of using what I already had, it simply created a new site.

By searching around people only want to know "how to integrate paypal with a membership site"...

Mine is supposed to be free; people join but don't need to pay for anything (at least for now) but some links can't be displayed to non-members.

I managed to get everything setup but I get an error...:

Warning: mysql_connect(): Access denied for user 'MYDATABASE_NAME'@'XXX.XX.XX.XX' (using password: YES) in /home/USERNAME/public_html/config.php on line 10 cannot connect to server

What's this? I have a few lines of code on the config.php

<?php

$host="www.triplestrata.com"; // Host name - my website
$username="MYDATABASE_USERNAME"; // Mysql username 
$password="MYSQLPASSWORD"; // Mysql password 
$db_name="MEMBER"; // Database name - I called my database MEMBER without the prefix


//Connect to server and select database.
mysql_connect("$host", "$username", "$password")or die("cannot connect to server"); 
mysql_select_db("$db_name")or die("cannot select DB");

?>

This is right, Ya?

Answer 1

Use session variables.
With them, you can limit the entry to the page only when the session is occurring.
Make a login page, and then allow session start on all your pages, so the login follows.
Then, on the page you require, just add a clause that determines that only with the session started as a member, can one enter the page. If not, exit to mainpage or something.
Example:

<?php
    Session_start();
    if (!isset($_SESSION["lojamusica"]))
            header("Location:errorlogin.php");
    if ($_SESSION["lojamusica"]!="OK")
            header("Location:errorlogin.php");

?>
In here, i am only allowing people with the session started, and connected to the database to enter my webpage, just need to pu this on top of the pages.
This is my loggin example, which came from a form on a previous page:

<?php


Session_start();
Session_destroy();

mysql_connect("localhost","root","") or die("problema na conexao");
mysql_select_db("lojamusica");
$query = "SELECT username, password FROM login WHERE username='".$_POST["user"]."'";
$results = mysql_query($query) or die(mysql_error());

$num = mysql_num_rows($results);
if ($num == 0)
    echo "Username not found!";
else  {
    $row = mysql_fetch_array($results);
    if ($row["password"] == $_POST["pass"])
    {
    Session_start();
    $_SESSION["username"] = $_POST["user"];
    $_SESSION["lojamusica"] = "OK";
        header("Location:mainpage.html");       
    }
    else
        header("Location:login2.html");

}
?>

This is the login page, simplified:

<form action="login.php" method="POST">
    <label>Username:</label>
        <input type="text" name="user" />
    <label>Password:</label>
        <input type="password" name="pass"  /><br>
        <input type="submit" value="Submit"   />
        <input type="reset" value="Reset">

>
</h1></form>

To logout, simply reditect to a page like so:

<?php
Session_start();
Session_destroy();
 echo "<script language='javascript'> window.top.location.href = 'login2.html';                </script>";
  ?>