I’m new and don’t have much experience so please bear with me. I’m trying to design a website which will have tutorials available for purchase and therefore I will need a password protected membership area, or at the very least password protected pages that will have the tutorials.
In an earlier post I read that the simplest solution is to set up password protection for the pages which need it with the web site host. My plan support the feature, however it protects only folders, not separate pages. When I created a folder for this purpose (before and also after the upload of the Freeway created website) and placed the web pages needing password protection in it, I got an error message that the pages could not be found.
Is there a way to instruct Freeway to place at the time of creation and then look for pages in a specific folder rather than at the root directory and encode at the time of publishing this way so I can upload the published website and then password protect the pages needing it already placed in a specific folder? Thanks a lot for any suggestions.
Break you site into two Freeway sites, one public, the other private. Set the public one to upload as usual and the private one to upload to the secure folder. Freeway does not know that this secure folder exists, you will have to add links to it in the public site yourself e.g. mysecurefolder/index.html .
I’m currently working on a project that I named PageLock that shall bridge that gap. The Freeway-template is ready to ship and it works as expected on my machine but neither I have Beta-Tested it by somebody out there, nor I wrote the user manual yet.
It should be mentioned that I plan to purchase this template for a few bucks so it needs to be a just-work.
PageLock shall set you in a position, that you can either add clients manually to a database (so they can login to that point you want) or you can set somewhere a self register form if you just plan to force user to register before they can get in.
What you would need is a MySQL Database and a copy of FreewayPro (not Express) v5.5 min.
One negative thing to close this: I can’t ensure this to be hack-safe or similar.
Thanks everyone for your replies, appreciated. LinkLok seems like a handy thing to have and Thomas, once you have the PageLock ready, please make a post. Looks promising.
Hi,
Rather than start another thread, I thought I’d post here, since this question seems resolved.
I created my site in Freeway Pro 5.6.1. Earthlink was hosting it. In the top master page menu the word DOWNLOADS has an embeded link to the external URL www.septaudio.com/CLIENT_DOWNLOADS
With the Earthlink control panel, I created the folder CLIENT_DOWNLOADS within the public_html folder. Within the CLIENT DOWNLOADS folder, I created several client folders and set each with a unique user name and password.
This all worked well until Earthlink “upgraded” their server system and control panel. This “upgrade” broke the ability to assign individual user names & passwords to the folders. Tech support told me they “were working on it”. So, I moved my site to another host.
I used my control panel to create a folder within the public_html folder named CLIENT_DOWNLOADS, as I did before. I also created a folder named ROOM_DESIGN within the CLIENT_DOWNLOADS folder and uploaded files into it, as I have some pressing business that depends on this.
When I visit the site and click on the DOWNLOADS (embeded link) menu item, or manually enter the path into the browser URL, I get:
“403 forbidden You don’t have permission to access /CLIENT_DOWNLOADS/ on this server.
Apache/2 Server at www.septaudio.com Port 80”
By clicking on the embeded link, or manually navigating there, I should get a page titled CLIENT_DOWNLOADS showing me the ROOM_DESIGN folder ready to double-click open.
By clicking on the embeded link, or manually navigating there, I should get a page titled CLIENT_DOWNLOADS showing me the ROOM_DESIGN folder ready to double-click open.
Creating a Folder does not mean an associated webpage - there has to be an index page within that folder. Unless you have set your Index Manager to no indexing which will allow all and sundry to see your folders contents - not recommended!
So your ‘page’ CLIENT_DOWNLOADS is actually a list of the folders within. If you get a 403 then that is likely to mean that Index Manger is set to No Index.
So you are better to have an index.html page within your client downloads folder which has a list of links to an index page within each client’s folder with the individual clients folders password protected.
Either that or you provide each client with a direct link to their own index page within their own protected folder.
Thanks for your very succinct and complete answer.
<So you are better to have an index.html page within your client downloads folder which has a list of links to an index page within each client’s folder with the individual clients folders password protected.>
I’ll see if I can get this to work and report back. It does seem odd to me I didn’t need to insert index pages in the old Earthlink set up.
Thanks for your very succinct and complete answer.
<So you are better to have an index.html page within your client
downloads folder which has a list of links to an index page within
each client’s folder with the individual clients folders password
protected.>
I think that Dave was hinting at the fact that having directory
indexing on in a folder is a security reduction. By allowing anyone to
see everything in that folder, you remove one layer of protection from
your server.
I’ll see if I can get this to work and report back. It does seem
odd to me I didn’t need to insert index pages in the old Earthlink
set up.
If Earthlink was set up this way, then it was missing this layer of
protection, and relied on you the user to always put an index.html
file (even a blank one) in any folder that you didn’t want to have
listed. I feel that this was a very casual default for them to choose.
On 6 Aug 2011, at 15:06, Walter Lee Davis email@hidden wrote:
On Aug 6, 2011, at 6:42 AM, Craig Harding wrote:
Hi David,
Thanks for your very succinct and complete answer.
<So you are better to have an index.html page within your client downloads folder which has a list of links to an index page within each client’s folder with the individual clients folders password protected.>
I think that Dave was hinting at the fact that having directory indexing on in a folder is a security reduction. By allowing anyone to see everything in that folder, you remove one layer of protection from your server.
I’ll see if I can get this to work and report back. It does seem odd to me I didn’t need to insert index pages in the old Earthlink set up.
If Earthlink was set up this way, then it was missing this layer of protection, and relied on you the user to always put an index.html file (even a blank one) in any folder that you didn’t want to have listed. I feel that this was a very casual default for them to choose.