Question

How can I do one login script that uses cookies for login and for example I want to check if the visitor is logged in without querying the database.

For example I want on frontpage to show some menu’s only for logged in users .

so I must do if(isLoggedIn()) show the menu . But that’s a query everytime the page loads so it’s not very good

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

You can do this:

session_start();

// Use $HTTP_SESSION_VARS with PHP 4.0.6 or less
if (!isset($_SESSION['loggedIn'])) {
  $_SESSION['loggedIn'] = true;

  // Add all the relevant user information data
  $_SESSION['username'] = $username;
  $_SESSION['password'] = $password;
  $_SESSION['etc'] = $etc;
}

Then you can request the user data to the $_SESSION global array.
E.g.: requesting if the user is loggedIn (Don’t forget to call to session_start() first):

function isLoggedIn() {
    return (isset($_SESSION['loggedIn']) && $_SESSION['loggedIn']);
}

If you want to log out:

session_destroy();

The timeout can be handled in the php.ini file:

; After this number of seconds, stored data will be seen as 'garbage' and
; cleaned up by the garbage collection process.
session.gc_maxlifetime = 1440

Or you can handle ini variables in run time using ini_set:

ini_set('session.gc_maxlifetime', $sessionMaxLifeTime);