Create a site with login and private pages

[Helena]

Im trying to create a site for relatives and people suffering from a rare disease. Some pages will be public but the rest including a forum would only be accessible after logging in. I am familiar with HTML but not so much PHP. Is there a simple way to do this that is also very secure? People would be sharing personal information about themselves, where to find doctors with experience etc so it must not be hacked easily.

Any advice would be most welcome

[Tommybs]

There are a number of ways you can make this secure. But as always there are risks. As you are not too confident with PHP I would suggest using an 'off the shelf' forum solution. Now I've never used VBulletin, but a lot of people say it's good and it has a large community for support. It might be worth you asking another question in the community forum about this.

With regards to the security side of things, you also might want to look into getting an ssl certificate for the domain you host this on. Other options you could look at are also securing page of the site using a .htaccess file on top of user names and passwords. Though I suspect this could be quite a manual process and irritate users ( ease of use versus security ) . You could also look at only allowing certain IP ranges to further help lock the site down.

I know a lot of the above seems quite vague, but security is a minefield and this is what's initially occurred to me. There's a lot more and I'm sure plenty of others will offer advice.