What do I need to know how to do in order to do this?

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[debvh]

Hello all,

I have bumped up against the edge of my (minimal) skills. I need to find out what I need to learn in order to:

1. Allow paid customers to create an account so they can access members-only (or subgroup-of-members-only) content.

2. Allow paid customers to create an account, and then access only their own interactive content. For example, purchasing a course on red widgets, taking a test and getting back their score. Being able to re-take the test until they demonstrate a certain level of red widget mastery, and then get a red widgeteer certificate. Repeat process for blue widgetry.

Even if I end up hiring someone to do the actual programming, I still want to be able to understand the process. What do I need to learn?

Thanks,
debvh

[mack]

I think the most important choice will be how you accept payments and how are sign up's to be handled. For example you may wish to use portal script with a members area and manually allow membership after a payment has been received.

Alternatively you may wish the entire process to be more automated. In this case you would need to have your payment gateway closely meshed in with your membership system.

I think the solution you have in mind may require custom programming, although you may be able to use existing open source applications as building blocks. I believe it will be more a case of getting different scripts to work as one.

Mack.

[debvh]

Thanks. In the short term I could handle it manually but in the longer term I would like to automate the process, I think it will give customers more of the experience they would expect from this kind of business.

I hope this is just an uninformed question and not a stupid one: What kind of scripts or open source applications would I be looking at to accomplish this? Should I be learning PHP and how to get info in and out of databases, and/or something else?

[txbakers]

Should I be learning PHP and how to get info in and out of databases, and/or something else?

Yes, if your underlying technology is PhP.

Much better to learn it yourself than rely on scripts that may or may not do what you want them to do. And, if you know it, you can debug/modify scripts as you need.