Does anybody have any ideas on creating an automated premium section, where people buy membership, membership details sent to e-mail and then they have access.

Yes, you can do all that in php.

You will need a main page, a buy/login page, and a premium page that can only be accessed if the login info/cookie/session matches a premium account that is stored in a DB.

Yes, you can do all that in php.

Or ASP, ASP.NET, ColdFusion, Perl, Python etc

PHP would probably be the easiest (but I see what you're saying chrishirst).

The hardest part will be how you actually transfer funds from your clients. Using a prebuilt system like Zen Cart or Cube Cart will certainly make your life easier. If you choose a framework like that, you can probably ask on one of their forums and get more specific instructions.

You can also find a variety of applications that are already set up to handle the technical side of things. The most important things in having a membership section of your site is having content people actually want to pay for and marketing the site so the people who would be interested know it exists.

I'm sure you can purchase ready-made solutions that will allow you to add your custom content to a membership area and allow automated signup/delivery of membership details.

Actually, this site is pretty popular:

http://www.amember.com - it's about $200.

Alternatively, you can do a search in a search engine for "membership manager" or "membership management software" or "members area (software|script)" without the quotes.

If you have a little bit of money and no server-side coding experience, you can also hire a coder to write a custom setup for you -- on the low end you might be able to pick something up for $250 or maybe a little bit less depending on where you look. Or, you might be able to pickup a free membership script and pay a coder to integrate a payment processor (may be cheaper).

I believe that there are also membership managers for Wordpress -- you might want to look into that.

Some affiliate program managers also allow you to create "members only" sections. I use this - http://jam.jrox.com - on a few of my websites and it allows you to create "members only" sections, and it integrates with a number of different payment processors. However, if you want to consider this, hit up site support to be sure that it works for you, and then purchase the plugin from the site right away instead of using the free trial -- at least with the last license I purchased, I was able to get it for $125 instead of the $250 that you must pay if you choose the trial.

There are a bunch of ideas here, but you really have a lot of options when it comes to picking a membership area management/ info delivery system. Maybe something here will help you out.