Website database

hey all, I'm creating a political website for someone, and they want to have some type of login for content (not like a forum; more like access to pages and polls, that will send info to the user, depending on what they put) on the website. This login name needs to also contain info on the user that they put in upon membership, such as age, gender, etc. I don't know where to start with something like this, or i would have searched myself. We have a server and a domain, but not much else. So this leads to a few questions. Is there a specific language that will be able to be used for something like this? and does the web host have to support this language, or can software be uploaded via FTP? Any info directing towards information on this would be very helpful and will be much appreciated.

I believe the most common solution is MySql (database) and PHP (Web Pages).

The first thing you'll need to find out is what kind of hosting you guys have. To do what you're wanting to do, you'll want a database and scripting language support. Depending on what hosting package you have, you may have neither (database nor scripting language support), just one, or both. If your server is an MS server and you have both, it's probably going to be a combination of MS SQL Server (database) and ASP (language); if the server is *nix, it's probably going to be MySQL (database) and PHP (language). Once you know that you have both, you can start looking around for readily-built scripts (or pick up some SQL and the appropriate language). If you don't have both, you'll want to look into getting it anyway :):