CoffeeCup Flash Password Wizard: protecting your website with a password

The Coffee cup Flash Password Wizard uses Flash to protect your website with a password. It uses a Flash file to ask the user for a username and password before admitting them to the website. It requires the use of frames to effectively hide the website that you wish to protect. The product is available as a free trial with a $34 license fee beyond the trial period. Whilst this may appear to be a single function product, it does include an inbuilt FTP client to upload your files to your web server.

CoffeeCup Password Wizard is a program which will allow you to create password protected links in your pages.The application looks like this 

You can use this to either password protect the whole site by placing the protection at the front page of the site, or to protect sections of the site. You can also direct different users to different sections by allocating different links to different usernames.

You can customize the appearance of the username and password dialog by changing the alignment, font and background colour. You can define individual usernames and passwords or import a group of users using a comma separated file. You can either use a single URL for all users.

Once the options have been entered, the application generates a Flash file and will provide HTML code to be copied into your web page and then the webpage and the Flash file can be uploaded using either the inbuilt FTP client or your own FTP client.

There are two applications where this system has proved useful. In the first case, I purchased a domain name from a host who provides a facility to point the domain name at a specified folder and to hide the actual URL behind the domain name.

Thus if your new domain name is www.sitetobehidden.com, and your main web folder is www.mainwebfolder.com, create www.sitetobehidden.com in a subfolder www.mainwebfolder.com/hidden/ , set the domain hosting to keep the URL hidden behind the domain name, and assign the front page of the new domain to be www.mainwebfolder.com/hidden/password.html and set the link within the password wizard to index.html. In this way, users will only be able access the main front page and site by proceeding through the password protection.

A second application is to use the password wizard to protect a document repository on a public website. In this scenario, the password wizard is placed in the public area of the site. Public users can access the public area. Users can be given individual or group usernames and passwords to access documents relevant to the users’ roles.

For developers of simple websites, this application can provide a useful facility to protect sections or a whole web site. On the downside, the HTML to incorporate the Flash files is not W3C compliant but the same simpler compliant HTML can be used as with other CoffeeCup Flash applications reviewed in this series. Its use is a little more complex than some of the other CoffeeCup applications, and some thought needs to be given to site design, to ensure that the Flash cannot be avoided by direct access to pages behind it.