Well tryharder, there are a million ways to do this. And I think also wise to point out, there are a million levels on which you can do this- that is.. how far you can take it. how deep this works.. How secure, etc.

What you describe can be done in a few hours, or a few weeks. It depends on how far you want it to 'work'. This *is* for educational purposes - right? So.. I'm not sure- if this is for educational purposes, should you do this/be shown how.. minimally? so it works.. or what some others here would call 'looks like it works but is really broken'- ..

Or maybe.. since this is for a class- it should be a real world example- complete with taint checking... maybe email checking.. etc etc.

tryharder, you will have to honeslty ask yourself- do you just want to pass this class- or are you learning to code. Because, if you are learning to code for real,I think this should take you many many many days to do. A ton of stuff to learn.

If you are just passing your class- And there is absolutely nothing wrong with that! It can take you a lot less time. I don't know the rigurousness and strictness of your instructor.

Regardless; - I would suggest:

• work on each thing separately! Solve each problem almost isolated from the others. If you don't- you will go insane.
• These types of things: user creation, user validation (do they log in to make a comment?), user forgot password retrieval regeneration and response, the form input accept script (maybe even a whole chunk just devoted to making sure the submitted data isn't funny.--- ) - all these things should be looked at isolated from each other, as if each was one sepparate class assignment.. how to save user input to a flat text file, how to record to a db table.. how to generate a password.. (using apache basic validation might be a good idea here somewhere.. )
• read up ovid's cgi course as suggested - this is a wonderful incredible tutorial, this guy is adorable for having written that and shared it with everyone.

Those are some basic things. Also, why don't you post a url to your stuff? maybe a place where your code can be seen.. Basically.. this whole thing is pretty involved and complex. You don't usually get people coming here and saying "tell me how would i make a website?" -- hahah.. but that is a little bit what you are asking here.. it's too vague. People, tend to do more of.. asking on specific things when they run into problems. So... Take your project appart piece by piece first and ask questions on perlmonks as problems arise.. you will be astonished with the ammount of good energy and help you will receive here.- Be more specific.

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