encryption

Hello! I have a small problem. On my website there is some information I would like to protect. Right now I am using .htaccess to password-protect the directory, but I was thinking about using php and a form with usernames/passwords in a MySQL database. Thankfully, I read the following in the manual right before I was about to use the crypt() function to encrypt my password and compare it to the encrypted hash in the DB: "It seems that a lot of people don't understand the point of using one-way encryption. More importantly, a lot of web designers forget that PHP encryption is done entirely on the web server, not the client. Point being, if your form has a password input option and the user clicks SUBMIT, the password is then sent _as plain text_ over the Internet to the web server where it is then encrypted for comparison against a password database. Do _not_ use these types of functions to add security to a form unless you're using an SSL or TLS (etc.) encrypted session. The only potential way around this issue is for you to write a JavaScript program that does the hashing on the client side before being sent over the Internet (which would make this function unnecessary)." I am pretty new to PHP and absolutely clueless as far as encryption/algorithims are concerned. Could anyone possibly point me to a viable solution for this problem? Thanks in advance! Tom Malone