RE: registration/login function....

Paul.... Thanks for your input. However, what we're looking for is for more than 100-200 lines of code...We're looking for something that's pretty robust... and incorporates a number of different security features. Pretty sure that Yahoo/Amazon don't have 200 lines of code for their registration/login function!!!!! Be that as it may, we'd also be interested in something "Open Source" if it met our needs.. Our concern with writing it ourselves is that we let insecure items propagate through the code.... And yes.. we've been writing code for years.. so we're familiar with thoroughly testing the code... But this is why some basic functionality should be available so developers don't have to recreate the wheel from scratch....... Our $0.02 worth.... Regards, Bruce bedouglas@earthlink.net -----Original Message----- From: Paul Chvostek [mailto:paul+php@it.ca] Sent: Saturday, May 17, 2003 9:49 PM To: Bruce Douglas Cc: php-general@lists.php.net Subject: Re: registration/login function.... On Sat, May 17, 2003 at 05:24:50PM -0700, Bruce Douglas wrote: > > I'm in need of a seriously good Login/Registration application. Lots of 'em out there, for both PHP and Perl. Rather than searching sourceforge and *scripts for "user authentication" scripts, you might get further ahead by finding a software package that authenticates the way you like, then use that source code as inspiration when you write your own. I use PHP for this sort of stuff. One method is to mimic .htaccess-style authentication as described on the Zend page you've no doubt already looked at. Another way is to use session variables. It's pretty straightforward -- the user supplies a username and password in a form, which is submitted to a script which checks them against the database, and sets a session variable that indicates to "secure" scripts that this user is kosher. In my case, I set elements in an array with session details for the user -- their username, customer ID, language preference, display theme, etc. Once the array is set, the login script forwards the user to a "secure" page, which checks for the existence of the session variables. If they're not set, the "secure" page forwards the user back to the login page. The code that does this is in a file require()d by each "secure" script on the site. All in all, the login intelligence I'm using here comprises less than 50 lines of PHP code. It was written a few years ago, so I could probably tighten it up even more if I felt the urge to rewrite. The moral here is that if you're developing software, develop the software. If you look for example code for every little thing you need to write, you'll never get anything finished. If instead of searching script archives for what you needed, you had just sat down and written it yourself, you'd likely be hours ahead. The search for a wheel that matches your precise specifications may very well take longer than simply reinventing it. > The core of this code should really be written so that users don't have to > recreate it as needed...!!!! I'm looking for something "Open Source". I'm not sure what you mean by "recreate it as needed". And of course, any example code you find will likely be open source. Closed source things tend not to be distributed, because they're, well, closed source. -- Paul Chvostek <paul@it.ca> Operations / Abuse / Whatever it.canada, hosting and development http://www.it.ca/