I really don't have too many good choices. I am not that good in PHP. If you said 8 to 12 hours, that would translate to 50 hours in my case.

I am so frustrated right now that I can't make a good judgment. I am just desperate and regret even picking up Joomla as a solution for this project.
I wasted so much time and effort that I would have better done to pay somebody to make a little php registration form and do a whole website in XHTML and CSS and sleep happy. Now that I jumped, I have to see where I will land.