"open web page in new window"... how can I control the design of the new window?

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1

I’m new to Sitepoint so hope I have selected the right forum.

I develop e-learning & want to provide limited access to courses that I have uploaded to my server for evaluation & testing. I have already achieved the basic objective by creating a multiple-user password page that controls entry to a menu page with hyperlinks to individual course modules. The hyperlinks open the e-learning courses in a new window & therein lies my problem… the new window displays the filepath to the index.htm file so that anyone can copy & paste that into a browser thereby by-passing the password protection. In essence, I want the courses to open in a new bare-bones window that provides only minimise, maximise & close functionality & none of the other baggage.

I have been until recently working in FP2000 under XP & have tried a third-party plugin called J-Bots. It worked on older browsers but doesn’t work with any of the newer browsers like IE8, Chrome etc. I thought I could overcome it by moving to Expression Web which I already have on a Windows 7 HDD but when I went looking for a Win 7 version of J-Bots (now called J-Moves) I discover that they don’t have a 64-bit version! Is there any other third-party tool that I can purchase to overcome this? Failing that, is there a way of achieving this? Do I need to hire a Java developer & if so, how do I go about it?

Note that my courses are deployed to the wider arena from a third-party SCORM compliant LMS & the foregoing problem is easily overcome by checking the option “require LMS login” when I publish to HTML. I do not however, want to go down the LMS route on my own server. I just want to be able to provide an evaluation before purchase option from my company web server but at the same time protect myself from outright piracy.

Any help sincerely appreciated.

Geoff Pearson

2

JavaScript is not the answer, or should we say the site should still function without JS enabled and the user’s browser determines whether the window shows a URL, which it should do anyway. In either case I would still be able to retrieve the URL by other methods even if the address bar was absent.

To be honest it sounds like you should be using a server-side solution like PHP that requires the users to login first and is probably controlled by sessions or cookies for the files and directories thus disallowing none registered users gaining direct access via the URL.