Its not as much of the programming langauge of choice, moreover, the person doing the coding. PHP is a robust enough langauge to do just about anything you could possibly imagine web related. You should however take a few minutes and learn the PHP - MySQL interface (its amazingly simple), and you will save yourself alot of headache and server load. If you are using in combination with .htaccess be sure to check out the $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_USER'] and $_SERVER['PHP_AUTH_PW'] (mor einfo here :
http://www.php.net/manual/en/reserved.variables.php), will make your life easier.
Rory
