This is what ive been struggling to do for the past week,
basically if your visitors will be using computers that can accept cookies, and you have php4, you are probably best off using the session management inside PHP.
I am using a template i found in a PHP book, code reproduced below, which creates a usr id, pops it into a mysql database and then you can check the session id against the database and determine whether or not they are logged in (with a time out function of course). I haven't quite got it working yet, but its almost fixed, and i haven't put the username / password check (it will store the user;s id in the sessions table of db only if they pass a username / pass test.
This way is because some of my site visitors are using non cookie computers, but if your visitors are all likely to be cookie enabled, then use cookies......
here comes the sample code......
<?
/
** Demonstration of using session identifiers hopefully with an $logged modification to them.
/
// generates a session id
function SessionID($length)
{
/
** Set a pool of possible characters to set the session to
/
$Pool = "ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZabcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz";
for($index = 0; $index < $length; $index++)
{
$sid .=substr($pool, (rand()%(strlen($Pool))), 1);
}
return($sid);
}
// Seed the generator with the time
srand(time());
?>
<head>
<title>Untitled Document</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1">
</head>
<?
$mysql_link = mysql_connect("URL", "USER", "pass");
mysql_select_db("uniswap", $mysql_link);
// delete any sessions over 30 mins old from the db
$Query = "DELETE FROM session ";
$Query .= "WHERE LastAction < '";
$Query .= date("Y-m-d H:i:s", (time()-10800));
$Query .= "'";
mysql_query($Query);
// check if session exists
if(isset($session))
{
// we have a session so scope it against the DB
$Query = "SELECT * ";
$Query .= "FROM session ";
$Query .= "WHERE id='$uid' ";
echo $Query;
$mysql_result = mysql_query($Query, $mysql_link);
if(mysql_numrows($mysql_result))
{
// session does exist, update last time thingamyjig
$Query = "UPDATE session SET LastAction = now() WHERE id='$session' ";
echo $Query;
mysql_query($Query, $mysql_link);
print("session updated, expires in 30mins<br>");
}
else
{
// session has expired, sorry buddy
print("Expired session, please login.<br>");
$session = "";
}
}
// if session is empty, create a new one.
if($session == "")
{
$uid = SessionID(8);
// insert value into the dbase
$Query = "INSERT INTO session (
id,
LastAction,
usr_id,
logged
) VALUES (
'$uid',
now(),
$usr_id,
$logged
)";
echo $Query;
echo $uid;
mysql_query($Query, $mysql_link);
}
?>
<body bgcolor="#FFFFFF" text="#000000">
<a href="<? echo $PHP_SELF; ?>?uid=<? echo $uid; ?>">Test the session
baby</a>
<? echo $uid; ?>
<?
SessionID(8);
echo $sid; ?>
</body>
