Article
Managing Users with PHP Sessions and MySQL
Part One: The Signup Process
The Signup Form
A natural place to start building a site that will require users to register for access is the registration process itself. As one would expect, a simple Web-based form will do the trick. Here's what it will look like:
And here's the code for this form:
<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN"
"http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">
<html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">
<head>
<title>New User Registration</title>
<meta http-equiv="Content-Type"
content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1" />
</head>
<body>
<h3>New User Registration Form</h3>
<p><font color="orangered" size="+1"><tt><b>*</b></tt></font>
indicates a required field</p>
<form method="post" action="<?=$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']?>">
<table border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="5">
<tr>
<td align="right">
<p>User ID</p>
</td>
<td>
<input name="newid" type="text" maxlength="100" size="25" />
<font color="orangered" size="+1"><tt><b>*</b></tt></font>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right">
<p>Full Name</p>
</td>
<td>
<input name="newname" type="text" maxlength="100" size="25" />
<font color="orangered" size="+1"><tt><b>*</b></tt></font>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right">
<p>E-Mail Address</p>
</td>
<td>
<input name="newemail" type="text" maxlength="100" size="25" />
<font color="orangered" size="+1"><tt><b>*</b></tt></font>
</td>
</tr>
<tr valign="top">
<td align="right">
<p>Other Notes</p>
</td>
<td>
<textarea wrap="soft" name="newnotes" rows="5" cols="30"></textarea>
</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td align="right" colspan="2">
<hr noshade="noshade" />
<input type="reset" value="Reset Form" />
<input type="submit" name="submitok" value=" OK " />
</td>
</tr>
</table>
</form>
</body>
</html>
There is actually one piece of PHP code already embedded in this form:
<form method="post" action="<?=$_SERVER['PHP_SELF']?>">.
Notice the action attribute. In a familiar design pattern, which I have called multipurpose pages in previous articles, we are causing the form to be submitted to the same page containing the form code. By watching for the PHP variable $_POST['submitok'], which will be created by the submit button in this form (notice name="submitok" in the tag), our script will be able to handle the form submissions as well as the display of the form itself.
We're also using a relatively new form of syntax to print out the $_SERVER['PHP_SELF'] variable. In case you are unfamiliar with this syntax, allow me to clarify that <?=expression?> is functionally identical to <?php echo expression; ?>. Thus, in this case, we could have instead written the following:
<form method="post" action="<?php echo $_SERVER['PHP_SELF']; ?>">
Now that we've got the code for our form, we can move on to writing the complete signup script.