Password protection of the front end of a site

[antpre]

Hello everyone.
I have a "newby"'s question regarding password protecting the front end of on one of my website.

The web site in question is for the members of a small scale non profit organisation. It should not be easily accessed by non members but they don't want to force their members to create a personal user account. From their point of view a simple common password should be enough.

Here is my question : Can I use a newly created user and in the login form only ask for the password (I will feed the username in the code). In this case many users will potentially log with the same user at the same time. Is this approach correct, are there any drawbacks (performance ?)... or is it realy a bad idea ?

Otherwise I can just implement a simple password protection function without using the user system (didn't find a module addressing that need).

 

Thanks for your help

 

[Krlos]

Hi, you can try this module, it can be used for your case.

http://modules.processwire.com/modules/protected-mode/

I have used it while the website is in development so that only my clients can access the frontend.

 

[antpre]

Tks Krlos for your answer.
The module you mentioned leverages the PW user system wich is  what I am trying to avoid because I don't want to ask users to create a user account to log in.

Regards
 

[horst]

@antpre is it not possible to use one generic username? I know sites with download sections for press and they have a user named press with a good human readable password.

[horst]

If you only need a single word, whats about $session->forceLogin('aSingleWord')?

The you need to present a single input type text in the front end, check if the typed word matches a harcoded one an then use forceLogin().

[Krlos]

1 hour ago, antpre said:

Tks Krlos for your answer.
The module you mentioned leverages the PW user system wich is  what I am trying to avoid because I don't want to ask users to create a user account to log in.

Regards
 

You could create a generic user and distribute the access password to everyone.

[antpre]

Thanks horst and Krlos,

By generic user name you mean using one single user account with a generic name and then distribute the password to every member.

This is what I was trying to explain (the first option in my initial post)... but was not clear enough ! I can do this but I was wondering if having multiple users connected at the same time with the same user account would be problematic. If it can work that way, that's the best for me.