admin area - manage sessions?

[mosh_king2000]

Hi all, I have been developing a backend "admin area" where admins could login to do various things but need some control over this.

First, the directory where all the admin files are is htaccess protected. My thought is that I would like to be able to have only one admin logged in at one time. When another admin logs in, I would like that admin to know if anyone else is logged at the same time. Although I have some ideas for this (currently using a mysql db with a flag on/off type of direction), I was wondering if anyone knows of any good implentations for doing this well. Premade scripts are a plus. Can something clever be done with sessions to show another user on the page?

Again, I am a fairly proficient coder but just looking for ideas at this point to see if there are other ways of doing this.

Thanks gang,

Mosher

[devinemke]

couple ideas come to mind:

1. as you said, simply store admin logins in your db in a temp table. store who logged in and when, and then delete (or flag) the record when they log out. on each page request simply poll the temp table to see who is currently logged in.

2. if you are already using sessions then set sessions vars that track the same info above. on each page request scan through all of your session files and look for whatever var you have setup to indicate admin login. this idea is not quite as elegant if you have a busy site where sessions are being used for non-admin purposes since you might have to scan through a large number of session files to find the relavant ones.

the first db idea is the way to go.