Question

I’m learning PHP and main my concern is adding activity to my website, but I don’t know SQL. Is there a way to do this without SQL?

Answer 1

For a quick & dirty solution, you could store user credentials in an array, e.g:

$creds = array(                 array( 'username' => 'john123',                       'password' => 'hello'),                array( 'username' => 'lucyliu',                       'password' => 'dieblackmamba')                    //more sub arrays like above here          ); 

You can then match the user’s input, e.g.:

$username = $_POST['username']; $password = $_POST['password'];  $match = false; for($i=0;$i<count($creds);$i++) {     if(strcmp($username,$creds[$i]['username']) == 0) {         if(strcmp($password,$creds[$i]['password']) == 0) {                            // start session and set something to indicate that user is logged in             session_start();             $_SESSION['authenticated'] = true;             $_SESSION['username'] = $creds[$i]['username'];             $match = true;             }     } }  if($match) echo 'Login successful: welcome ' . $creds[$i]['username'];     else echo 'Invalid credentials'; 

EDIT: On subsequent page call, you can check if the user is still logged in by reading the $_SESSION

session_start(); if($_SESSION['authenticated'] === true) {      echo 'User ' . $_SESSION['username'] . ' is logged in.'; } 

To log out the user, you can execute this code:

    $_SESSION = array();     // If it's desired to kill the session, also delete the session cookie.     // Note: This will destroy the session, and not just the session data!     if (isset($_COOKIE[session_name()])) {         setcookie(session_name(), '', time()-42000, '/');     }     // Finally, destroy the session.     session_destroy(); 

It would be helpful for you to read about php sessions and arrays, and if I were you I would bite the bullet and try to get into SQL.