How to Create a Login & Registration Page for Your Website
In any user-driven dynamic website, a system for identifying and serving users relevant content represents an absolute necessity. Such websites include blogs, e-commerce, forums and email systems. Often,developers accomplish this task with a login and associated registration page. Adding a login and registration page will lend some professional polish to your website while also allowing you to collect important user data, which often plays a critical role in online marketing efforts—particularly in e-commerce.
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Things You'll Need
- Working knowledge of XHTML / CSS
- Working knowledge of SQL
- Working knowledge of PHP
Instructions
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Start by determining the information you'll need to collect from your users. Collect only the minimum amount of information so you don't frustrate your users with long forms. Using this information, create a form using the eXtensible Hyper Text Markup Language and Cascading Style Sheets. If you don't know how to do this, start with the official documentation (see References section).
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Write a PHP script to process your form. PHP stands for PHP Hypertext Processor, a server-side scripting language used for processing Web-based input and especially suited for processing forms. Your script will need to submit the form information to a database using Structured Query Language (SQL). This will allow you to access your form data at any time. After writing your script, add an action attribute to your form and set it equal to the name of your PHP script. You can add an attribute to the beginning of your form by adding "action=script.php" to the beginning of your form.
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Create a user log in form using XHTML and CSS. The form should contain the minimal amount of required information to verify a ' log in credentials (user name, password). The official XHTML documentation can provide more detailed instructions.
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Using the information submitted in your log in form, create a PHP script that checks the submitted information against previous database entries from the registration form. You'll need to build a query using SQL and use PHP to return true if the query returns, or false if it does not. Store the result in a cookie, and use it to determine access to the rest of your site.
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Tips & Warnings
These kinds of tasks are often routine and are implemented widely across many kinds of websites. If you do a lot of page building, consider using a framework to eliminate writing this kind of boilerplate. Most frameworks will have modules that can accomplish this kind of task automatically.
Sanitize user input any time you deal with databases and user input; failure to do so makes your site potentially vulnerable to hackers.
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Enter key image by HILAL Al Hinai from Fotolia.com
