I've been using Dreamweaver for years, but recently took the plunge to UD. I have a project now and need some advice on where to start.

The site is used by a specific group of people (not the general public). New content is posted monthly. The content is downloadable as Word files. We need to accomplish several things:

1) We need to track what is being used. Ideally, we would like to say who is using what, if that's possible. Each document is sponsored by a company, and we need to be able to tell that company that "1200 people downloaded your article this month."

2) To track people, we would like to have users register when they want to download something. Right now, it's just a simple form that they fill out, and the results of the form are emailed to the site administrator. Problem is, everytime someone wants to access something, they have to fill out the form again. I would like to set up a username/password option that people can fill out so they don't have to fill out the form each time.

3) I would like the results of the forms to be written to separate databases (we have a form for content and a form for info requests). I can only use Access or mySQL (preferably Access).

Thee will be about 1700+ people accessing the content on a pretty regular basis. There is more traffic when the content is new, then it tapers off as the month progresses. Can anyone point me in the right direction on where to begin? Any websites, tutorials, etc. would be great. I feel pretty overwhelmed and totally lost with all the power UD has. Any help at all would really be appreciated!

Hello Jeff and welcome to the community.

For starters you really should look here:
www.macromedia.com/support/ultradev/tutorial_index.html

That will help you with user registration and basic UDev instructions and a few working projects if/when you've followed it all.

The your next stop should be here:
www.udnewbie.com

then it's back to here on the zone:
www.udzone.com/categories.asp?TypeId=2

Those three links have tons of tutorials, from making a layer via flash login screens to complete descriptions of a poll, discussion groups, dynamic faq's and offcourse the download count you wanted, combining that tutorial with an additional field of the logged in user and you know exactly who is downloading what and how often.

I'm very curious to your endresult though, i suggest browsing around too, check the link sections on the MANY UDev related websites around, you'll be selling online within a week if you really want to.

The best tip of all is, start small and EXPAND and sometimes look back at what you did earlier, you'll find you can refine what you've allready done ending up with a stunning end-product with relative ease.

With kind regards,

Dennis van Galen
Webmaster KPN Services
Financial and Information Services

Hi Jeff,

Welcome!

I just wanted to add that in addition to the excellent resources Dennis has pointed you to that there is also a server behavior extension named T3 Download Counter by Tom Steeper that enables you to count downloads, and this might be useful for you. To obtain this free extension and instructions go to Tom's site at www.webuality.com.
Also, another rich source is Tom Muck's site at www.Basic-UltraDev.com. Tom is a coauthor of one of the best (in my opinion) UltraDev books written, Dreamweaver UltraDev4 The Complete Reference, and has written wonderful extensions including The BUD Force Download extension to enable downloads of say Word or PDF documents. He also has helpful tutorials on his site. Like Dennis said there are many sources of helpful persons and sites within the UltraDev Community. Best wishes to you in your new endeavors with UltraDev.

Best Regards,

Jean-Marie Bonnar

Jean-Marie and djvgalen,

Thanks so much for your tips. So far, I have the forms and database working properly, and everything seems to be going OK. However, I have been trying to add the ability for a registered user to retrieve a lost password. I would like for them to have to enter their username, then hit a submit button, and their login information will be emailed to them.

Another thing I would like to do (and from what I am reading, this is related to what I mentioned above) is have the results of the registration form emailed to the user who just registered. I have played around with this for about 12 hours, to absolutely no avail. On the server, I only have ABMail and Dundas Mail - No JMail or CDONTS (not that I would understand either of those much better, but at least there is some good documentation). I have searched everywhere I can, and tried a bunch of different things, but nothing is working.

My registration page is called register.asp. Once someone registers, they are taken to a page called current.html. I am assuming somewhere in between these two, I need something that will capture the fields that were submitted in the form, compose an email and send it to the user by pulling their address from the 'email' field in the form. I've read every tutorial I can find, and so far, everything I've read might as well be written in another language. I'm really frustrated with this, because I assume it's pretty simple once I do it once.

Can anyone shed some light on my dilemma?