Sessions, cookies, and loads of coffee... milk, one sugar please!

[meetn2veg]

To anyone out there.

Having virtually exhausted my mouse and shortened my fingers considerably with the sheer amount of typing, I finally come to the stage of asking a question.

Although new to php, I'm not new to Perl, HTML, Js, etc., so I'm not stupid with certain things or concepts. However, this one to do with cookies and sessions just has me pulling out my fingernails which, at the moment, is a far less painful alternative!

I've looked in all the usual places for code snippets, my modem didn't know what had hit it after all uploads and fairly exhaustive testing to see what worked and what didn't!

Upwards of possibly 100 hours searching, reading, finding (sometimes conflicting) descriptions on "How to.."s, and basically making the whole situation compound upon itself.

Now, back to the question-asking stage I mentioned:

What I'd like to do;
- On the Main page (index.php for ex. using code-style syntax)

If (new_visitor) {display User Sign Up link}
If (registered_user) {display "Hi Fred. Want to login?" - Yahoo! style}
display Log In box to all

I didn't have any luck with the "multitude" of Authentication scripts out there (Why? don't ask me!) but I managed to do that part from scratch for myself. (Not bad for 2 1/2 weeks worth of PHP! Or is it? )

Now comes the fun part - I presume that I will need a combination of both cookies and session vars: cookies for when users are not logged in (and for future possibilities - User preferences etc.) and also Sessions for when users are logged in. Am I on track here?

Any help would be most welcomed, greatly appreciated, and any other complementary gratitgudes which may apply.

As and when I get this whole thing 'done and dusted', I will be uploading the whole lot at a "tutorial", 'cos I haven't managed to find one I could relate to yet!

End of babbling... Eagerly awaiting any reply.

Many thanks,
R.

[MrAlaska]

PHP might offer a simpler means of dealing with this, I don't know. I happen to be a proponent of managing my own sessions so I do not use PHP's session management, but this is how I think I would approach it if I did.

Since you are not logging them in automatically, you can leave the php session management you are using as is and only need to add a couple things if you want to keep it simple.

When they log in and pass authentication, you then set a cookie with their user ID, you will never need to read this cookie except at the beginning of a new session.

When they visit a page you check for authentification (which you are already doing since you have your sessions working). If they are authenticated you do what you are already doing.

If they are not authenticated check for a user-id. If you have no user-id in your session variables, check for a cookie. If one exists register the session with their user-id and preferences (if you wish) but do not authenticate it until they log in.

If they are not authenticated but you have a user_id for them set in your session variables, display the login (populated with their name) set to their preferences which may also be in the session variables or being collected from the database.

if no user-id is available and no cookie exists you display the generic sign up form.

Of course, the login form and signup form will need links to each other in case the cookie has been destroyed or the person is on someone elses machine.

[PhaZZed]

I am alo pretty new to php and the likes, but have looked into similar things, here are my views..

when someone arrives @ the website you need a cookie to see who it is...

search for cookie, if not exists... "Sign Up"
if exists(cookie) then read(cookie).. "Login Person"

That would be the start of your question, once the person has logged in, then you would need to initiate session management, and this is where i leave you because I am too new to sessions to preach 🙂

Hope that helps!

[jmcneese]

if (isset($s) && !emtpy($s)) {
    session_id($s);
} else {
    session_id(md5(uniqid(rand(),1)));
}

session_name("s");
session_start();
$s = session_id();

if(isset($_COOKIE['registered']) && !empty($_COOKIE['registered'])) {
    /*
    do login person stuff here
    */
} else {
    /*
    do sign-up stuff here
    */
}