http://net.tutsplus.com/tutorials/php/user-membership-with-php/

There is no simple way around this. You are going to need to know how to set up a database and know a bit of PHP. Adding a payment option is a bit more complicated. This isn’t very hard and someone that knows what they are doing could bang out in a day. It might be worth it to just hire someone to do it for you.

Opportunity costs and all that.

As per @blah_blah ‘s response – you’ll need decent understanding of PHP and Databases (ex MySQL) to be able to achieve that. In development time, I’d really recommend using a popular CMS and an extension designed exactly for what you want – or at worst needing some modification.

Using popular CMS systems is a bit of a security risk (for defacing, not necessarily database compromises (dumping) – but keeping up to date with updates and backups still makes it cheaper (time-wise) than developing something from scratch.

Alternatively you could use a light CMS and develop the extension on your own.
This site has a lot of CMS demos to choose from: http://www.opensourcecms.com/
You get a demo user/admin account to test it out.

For the uber secure applications, login forms (and whole web apps) are built in Python/Django, Java, or C++. This is definitely possibly with PHP, but a significant amount of knowledge is needed to make it work using session cookies, SQL databases, and careful, secure code.

Try drupalgardens.com.

webs.com works for me. Goto Youtube and I am sure there is a vedio. If not, just try out webs.com. I have made a site on webs that has logins and I know some examples. Here is one.

Log-in Site from webs.com

(My friend told me about this site today. I don’t know who made it. It is just an example to show you.)

@pizzaman Youtube is a terrible place to learn about programming (though I’m sure it can be done), and Webs is more of a self-hosted CMS with poor interconnectivity to what @superjuicebox is creating. I’m sure it has some good uses, but not exactly in this context.