Site Flow -- Signup to Profile, forms as transitions

messels

okay, hopefully the title didn't scare you off.

i'm interested in understanding the best practice for page transitions from a signup page (with a form) to a profile page. the same applies for a login page to the same user profile page.

here's an example of what i'm doing now, using the signup page

PHP Code:
<form id="myform" class="cssform" method="post" action="profile.php">
<h1 class="cssform"> <ul class="cssform"><li>Sign Up</li></ul></h1>
<p>
<label for="username"> username</label>
<input type="text" name="user_name" id="username" value="" />

//then on profile.php i process the signup, starting with:
PHP Code:
<?php

if (isset($_POST['signup']))
{

include "database.inc.php";

$user_name = $_POST['user_name'];

messels

hmm, i hit enter and it posted before i was done.

so, should i use javascript on signup.php that first processes whether it's a valid signup? also, i guess don't quite understand if i should be using the <form...action="profile.php"> or keeping the action to action="#"

does that make sense? any help is appreciated. i feel like this is an important best practice to understand for site usability...

NogDog

You can use JavaScript as a convenience to the user to quickly identify missing fields and invalid input formats, but you still need to do all validations on the PHP side of things, as you cannot depend on 100% of your users having JavaScript enabled, and malicious users can easily bypass it.

I don't know of a "best practice" with regard the action attribute's value. If the form page sends to itself, you can just do action="", but I usually do:

<form method="post" action="<?php
echo $_SERVER['SCRIPT_NAME'];
?>">