talking to a web page

Hi, all -- My host has written a control panel to handle all site management needs, and it's great except that there's no back-end hook that I can use to create a new site or user once I have collected my input and verified my payment in my own pages. I obviously don't want to have to do all of the site creations by hand; that's why we have computers :-) At this point I could either figure out all of the steps for creating a site -- there are, to my knowledge so far, DB tables to update, dirs to make, other files to update, and apache to restart -- or figure out how to talk to the control panel from a script. With nearly fifteen years of SysAdmin background but only a few years of PHP background, I know which I think is probably easier or at least quicker :-) but I don't want to miss any little things that their interface does that will bite me in the tail later. The control panel requires authentication and a cookie and then a few clicks to get to the fill-ins, so I imagine that I could just construct that form and hand it off -- except for the login authentication part. Which route would y'all take, and (more importantly) which would you recommend to someone at my capable-but-not-expert level? Remember that I'll come back to the list when I get stumped ;-) TIA & HAND :-D -- David T-G * There is too much animal courage in (play) davidtg@justpickone.org * society and not sufficient moral courage. (work) davidtgwork@justpickone.org -- Mary Baker Eddy, "Science and Health" http://justpickone.org/davidtg/ Shpx gur Pbzzhavpngvbaf Qrprapl Npg!