user authentication

Hi all, I'm still trying to get my site to work just right. Basically I'm building a "secure" portal. What I want to do is: 1) get user info from form 2) submit name & password to query template 3) query template checks login::: i) if good - needs to... a) initialize this user's session by setting session variables and a cookie. b) redirect to the portal landing page ii) if bad - redirect to error template my problem is getting the session started (part i/a) before the redirect (i/b). It seems if I do a session_register()...etc. it doesn't work. I'm new to PHP, and coming from Cold Fusion where it's extremely easy to setup a user session as above. How do I do this in PHP? Thanks everyone. -free