How secure is this feature  It is pretty secure.  Nothing is invulnerable.  However, I would feel confident that my email address would be protected from the robot programs that scan web pages looking to harvest email addresses for SPAMMERS.  It would take a determined and knowledgeable person to break this security scheme.

Dynamic Pages  Pages that are dynamically created cannot be secured.  This would include catalog pages, EZ-Directory pages, EZ-Bulletin Board, and EZ-Calendar.  However, there is an indirect way to make it difficult for a casual person to view dynamic pages.  You can do this by making sure that any links to these dynamic pages are from pages that are in protected folders.  In this way, anyone trying to access these pages must navigate there by way of a page that is protected.  Thus they would have to enter a user id and password before they could proceed.

Log in Once. Once a person has logged into a password protected folder, they will not have to log in again as they move around you web site.  For example after logging into a protected the folder, the visitor may visit other pages on your web site.  If during their visit, they clink on a link to a page in a protected folder, they will NOT have to enter their user name and password again.  Once a person is logged in, they can visit any folder which you have given them permissions without logging in again.  Only after they close their browser will the system "forget" who they are.

Home Directory. You cannot protect your home directory.  Therefore, you cannot protect your home page.  However, there are two ways to indirectly protect your home page.

• First, you make your home page a “push page” that automatically redirects the traffic to another web page that is in a protected directory.   The redirect ability is part of a special meta tag.  Refer to a book on HTML.
• Second, you could make your home page a page of general information with a link to the interior version of the Home Page that is located in protected folders.

Expiration dates. Permissions that you grant to users are continuous until you remove them.  There is no automatic expiration date associated with the permissions.

Logs. The system does not log when a password is used.  There is no historical information maintained about the user, when it was created nor, what they did.

CONCLUSION

Password protecting folders is not very difficult to do.  It is a easy to segregate your web site between two groups of visitors.   Just remember the steps to create Users and then to make a folder as protected.

We invite you to take a short quiz to see if you learned the most important principles.  Don't worry.  The quiz is open book and we don't even record your score.  But you can see if you learned something.