Direction

(Not sure if this is the right forum for this question. If not, feel free to move.)


I am looking for some direction. I am not a programmer or developer, only someone with an idea that is beyond his current skill set, but it is an idea I intend to pursue.

I will be general in my initial question:

How does one make a membership site in which each user has his own space when he logs in?

For example, when I log into Facebook, I see things that are unique to my account. The interface and the design is the same as everyone else's, but the content is "my" content.

I need to create a site in which each user has his or her own space and the content is "his or her" content. In general, how is this done?

Are the membership software packages that are available capable of this level of granularity or is this something that is more customized that those packages can offer?

Longer term, my intention is to create mobile apps that access this data for each user, in case that ties into the answer to the above question.

Thanks in advance.

I will go ahead and move your post to "General Web Building".

To give a quick answer to your question, such things as logins and profiles are handled on the back end of a website-- the server side. That's where you get into languages such as PHP, ASP, ColdFusion, etc. On this back end is where you can interact with files on the server, or more typically, a database such as MySQL. Using a database, you can store a person's account information (username, password, etc) in tables and control access to certain pages using sessions. In PHP sessions works by creating a cookie on the client PC that contains encrypted information, and your PHP scripts check this cookie on every request.

There are boxed solutions for this sort of thing-- the well-known CMS products (Drupal, Wordpress, Joomla, etc) usually come with account management, or have plugins to handle it. But it's a pretty basic functionality and many web developers have rolled their own solutions.