site login

how do I maintain a single login for all site services?

[alkuma]

My site till now had only static pages, but I'm planning to change that soon, with many features that would be interactive in nature, making the website interactive to a larger extent.

Now, the question is: I may need to ask people to login in order to post, or to order merchandise, or some such.

Whenever I see a pre built package for any particular service, say shopping, they have their own login module. I 'd like the users to have to login only *once* and after that, it should be smooth sailing for them.

How do you achieve this? Do I need to write my own login code? If I do, how does it mesh with the login facility/requirement in the individual packages that I would install on my server?

[zulu_dude]

It sounds like you're going to need to brush up on your PHP/ASP skills!

Seriously though, you're going to need to modify the code of the packages in some way. They probably login the users using session variables or by setting a cookie. What you will need to do is hack the package code and make it so that they all use the same session/cookie variables. How easy or difficult this is to do totally depends on the packages concerned.

[alkuma]

zulu_dude, thanks for the response.
I've been trying my best to avoid learning php, but now that I've decided to move to dynamic pages, it's inevitable that I learn it.