Inside Technique : Adding Site Registration : Conclusion and Download Files

You have seen how to add a site membership table to your web-site. By itself, this membership table is not very useful. However, by combining the site membership table with additional features you can create a rich, personalized experience. For example, in the t_user table every user has a unique id. This id serves as the user's identifier throughout the system. For example, in a message board, this id is used to associate a message post with a particular user. For our next article, we plan on extending the concepts and database introduced in this to create a simple message board.

Installing the Demo

This demonstration requires a Window's NT machine with IIS 4.0 and SQL Server. To install this demonstration, you need to download membership.zip and decompress all the files and directories into your web-sites root directory. Once the files are in your root directory, you need to create your SQL Server database.

We built this demonstration using SQL Server 6.5 but there is no reason it should not run with SQL Server 7.0. To make it easy to create the database, you will find a file called membership.sql that contains all the SQL commands necessary to create the tables and stored procedures. You just need to execute this SQL file against a new SQL Server database. (In SQL Server 6.5, after creating the database, open the SQL Enterprise Manager, select the database, choose SQL Query Tool from the Tools menu and open and run the membership.sql file).

As we said in the beginning of this article, by itself this code is not intended to serve as the foundation for a user membership system. Before introducing this into a production system you need to evaluate the performance, security and error handling of the scripts. We permit you to reuse these scripts as a learning device. To reuse this work in a production system, we ask that you make available to us for possible publishing any updates or changes you make to the database or interactions with the database. This includes any extensions built into the system (eg., adding message boards, etc).

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