auto sign up script

[PrestonKD]

Greetings. I am new to the forum. I have been designing web sites for about a year. I am reasonably comfortable doing all the graphic design and related stuff but get a little lost on the terminolgy for scripts and the like as most of what I have done is just web presence sites for businesses and not e-commerce type sites. I say that as a preface to my question because what I am looking for may not even be called a script. I need a little direction.
Here is what I want to do: I am designing an information site that will be free to the public and have various articles and resources to help people in a particular area of interest. I want to allow various service providers to sign up automatically on the web site so that their information is displayed when somebody searches my site for their service in the geographic area where the vendor registered. For example only, say you search for a landscape designer in Nashville, TN. If there were any landscape designers that had purchased the right to be displayed for Nashville, TN then the customer would see their listing on my site.
I have seen many of these type sites. The whole process is automated and instantaneous. It may be that I need one script for the sign up and another to manage the geographic area or search. Like I said, this may not even be a script. I would appreciate any information pointing me in the right direction. Thanks.

[PrestonKD]

Let me narrow this down a little bit. I have found scripts for subscription sites and membership sites. That does not quite seem to fit. This site will be free unless a vendor-advertiser wants to be listed in our vendor search list. I somebody could tell if there is a single script that will do what I am looking for or if I am going to have to employ multiple scripts - one for each peice of what I am trying to do - I would appreciate it. If there are multiple scripts it would help a lot to know what to call the other type scripts. For instance - the membership script sounds like what I need for sign up and payment portion. I would not know what to call a script that would search the vendors and only display the ones in the geographic area that was searched. Thanks for any help.

[vinyl-junkie]

What you're talking about doing at the very least is customizing the sign-up script to capture the information they provide in the sign-up form and store it in a database. When they return to your site, you would need another custom script that would read their information from the database, then make some decisions about what to display to them.

You have your choice of scripting languages to choose from to do this, but one of the most popular is PHP. As for customizing and writing these scripts, you can either do it yourself or pay someone to do it for you. Your choice.

Hope this helps.

[PrestonKD]

Thanks for the reply. Looks like I need a script writer. I want to learn to "understand" scripts but I feel I'm probably spread a little thin right now to learn to write them.
Can anyone shed some light on what language something like this should be written in so I know what kind of programmer to look for? Are different langauges better for different things or is it just preference. My host supports PHP, Python, CGI, Ruby and Ruby on Rails. Sorry for the newbie questions. Thanks for the help.

[vinyl-junkie]

As I said in my previous post:

You have your choice of scripting languages to choose from to do this, but one of the most popular is PHP.

An application like yours would be a good candidate to write in PHP. Plus, it should be fairly easy to locate someone to do the work for you.