I am trying to design a small website for my old high school class to get in touch with each other. I have a working knowledge of perl, and a brief understanding of HTML. What is the best way for me to have passwords for all of my old classmates and to have those passwords verified for some of the pages?

I would be willing to learn another scripting language (like MySQL or PHP or some such), but I would prefer to find a way to do this with perl or SSL. I don't mind encryption or no encryption. Any suggestions are welcome. Thanks.

Two things I forgot to mention... I would like to add the following guidlines if possible, but if they can't be done, then so be it...

1) I will also have a forum (that I'm not writing) on the web page and I would like these protected pages to share passwords with the forum so there is no need to verify two passwords and to not have to verify a password twice.

2) If at all possible, I'd like to do this in perl and write it for myself.