setting dynamic cookies

[RiceRocket]

Ok, I'm making a very simple message board for a school project where users have to login to post messages.

What should I be storing in cookies so that I can have many users logged in at once and how do i check to see if the cookie is set or not (to change user preferences)?

[barand]

You seem to have answered the first part yourself - user and preference values.

You access them via the $_COOKIES array using

$value = $_COOKIES['cookiename'].

hth

[scoppc]

what u should be storing in the cookies, it's all up to you. What I mean is, people usually have different information, set for cookies.
For my case, I save username, member level and a checkpoint (this cookie contains an encrypted value to verify that the username and member level are not altered by user)

So, you may want to save the username only, for instance.

To check whether a cookie has been set or not, you can do the following:

if (isset($_COOKIE['username'])){
      print "Cookie is set!";
}else{
       header("Location:login.php");
}

HTH

[Moonglobe]

well, you should probably only be storing an ID cookie, if you're doing this against a db (which is the only reall way you can, other than thousands of cookies per user).

as for how to check if a cookie is set, use :

if (isset($_COOKIE['ID']) {

etc....

edit: i c someone else has already answered you. wonder y it didn't show up in a refresh of the reply page........