website password system

Miscellaneous Forums/General Discussion/website password system

Hiya, what's the best way to have password restricted areas on your website so that members can logon and then view their own private page and/or pages for members only etc? Do you know of any free software (no ads) that can do this or is it best to code from scratch in perl or php or something? I've seen one made in perl before using https...

Anyway advice much appreciated, thanks.