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ZAP can be used to create a very powerful membership driven website. And now, with the recent upgrades to ZAP, it is more secure than ever! Here are a few basic details to help you get started:
New Member Registration
1) To create member accounts, simply copy the Register snippet to your site, and add or delete profile fields as desired. (Be sure to change the register field to match your changes). Fields Member and Password are both required. Collecting email addresses is optional--but if done, use "Email" as it is handled in several special ways in ZAP (see EmailList).
2) When the form is submitted various checks are made and the register fields in the form are stored in group "Profile". These pages do not need to be read protected, but could be restricted so only users can see their own profiles. By default, the Email and Password fields are encoded.
Login
To create a login form, simply copy the Login snippet to your wiki. It should work automatically.
I have not yet been able to figure out how to make this snippet work properly in Site.AuthForm, but it's probably doable. Instead, I just create a warning page there and provide a link to the login page.
If you wish to log member logins, see the LoggingPlus snippet for ideas. A similar step could be added to the register form to create a list of recent accounts formed.
Profiles
To give members the ability to update their profile information, create a simple update form for the various data fields and put it in Profiles.GroupFooter. I use a conditional like this (:if equal {$AuthId} {$Name}:) to only allow members to update their own information.
To let them update their Email or Password fields, you will need to decode them using the {(code Field_}=] markup. To create a form that verifies an encrypted password, again, see the ZAP Encrypt page in the developers section.
Site Customization
Once your accounts are set up, it is easy to customize your site based on any profile information you have. Suppose you asked them their favorite color. You could do something like this:
(:table bgcolor={Profiles.{$AuthId}$:Color}:)
Or if you only wanted to show members who lived in Alaska a certain bit of text, try this:
(:if equal '{Profiles.{$AuthId}$:State}' 'Alaska':)
There are many more possibilities you could imagine. Feel free to let me know if you come up with some great ideas.
If you have a question about upgrading your member profiles from an earlier version of ZAP, click here. Otherwise, that's about it on using ZAP as a CMS!