[ALUG] Creating Customer Login facility on a website

[sagr]

Our company has used email and ftp file transfers between itself and it's 
customers for quite some time.  However it is only in the last few days 
that I have started to create a simple website for it.  I have however got 
stuck with how to create a customer login page.

Traditionally we have put files for individual customers to download in 
individual .htpaccess protected directories, so that, for example, files 
for customer1 have been put in /customers/001, and files for customer2 have 
been put in /customers/002.  This has worked well but now we are getting a 
website I would like to provide a better user interface and have a single 
common "Customer Area" webpage where our customers can type in their login 
name and password and then be automatically taken to a protected personal 
webpage listing the files waiting for them to download.  i.e. if they login 
with the username: firstname1.surname1 they will automatically be taken to 
website/customers/001/index.html

Does anyone have any suggestions how to achieve this.

Our customer base is quite stable so setting up the individual login data 
entries in an ascii configuration file by hand would not worry me. 

Any suggestions welcome.

sagr.