Membership set up

Hello all, wondering if anyone can help me. I want to set up a site where people become members and pay a small fee to view further information. In other words I give them a brief description of a 'article' or 'book' and they can gain access to the full content by registering as a member and paying a small fee. They can then freely download any information they want from the site.

Q1 How do I set up the secure area where they must login to gain access? where would the files be stored when I setup the hosting?

Q2 How do you set up the login area and the facility for their login to gain access to the information?

Q3 What's the best method (cheapest) of them paying their membership fee and where can I get the software to do that?

Any help with this would be much appreciated. I may seem a bit naive but i've only so far done informative websites never anything which would involve 'shopping' or a members area.

Thanks

Might be late for you BUT YOU could try this for the membership HERE Which runs through paypal, once the set up is complete you can define different areas with different costs. and your restricted pages can be built xara.

Also you could try CMS like joomla with it's many add ons features it a good option. which also you can build add on page with xara making them look like the CMS template.

Heya,

IMO - Use a CMS = Content Management System. Alien Dude stated Joomla.

The Joomla ACL as of 1.5 sucks - really depends on the level and type of of memberships you want. For a basic membership site where they have to sign-up, it's fine. "you can add a pay module..... with various payment gateways."

I'm not knocking Joomla, It's my main CMS I push to clients.. It's just "as I stated", the ACL is limited. 1.6 will change all this and offer custom group (s) permissions, etc....

As of now, you can set content up for - public - regitered - etc...

There are components and modules that will help add GROUPS with permissions.

I would be happy to answer anyones q and a's on membership sites... paid and free alternatives..

Drop a PM to me and I'll do what I can to steer you in the right direction.

I see this topic alot thru out the forms I frequent, bout time for a tutorial I reckon.. ;)

Try joomsuite for joomla, I use it and it is excellent
Jeff