Login Update
January 7, 2007 - 11:26
- user login - splash
* still in sandbox
User login, registration, and registration confirmation pages are now live. I recently changed the variable I am passing via the session arrays. At first, I was only passing the unique user id number, corresponding to the user record in the DB. After some lengthy considerations, I have decided to pass an array of user information (nothing sensitive), opposed to only the user id. Instead of using multiple session variables, I am passing one variable, an array of user information. As of right now, I have only implemented this change on my main splash login page (index page), and not the user login page I recently made; thus, sessions started in the login page are not being read correctly on the splash page (and vice versa). This will be a quick fix, as I only need to change the way the session is being created in the login page. I purposely have two separate login processing scripts. This allows me to test changes in one VS changes in the other. Ultimately, I will almost certainly have only one login script that gets called wherever needed. I decided to change the session variable to be an array to cut down on the number of DB queries that needed to be performed per page load. I doubt they were causing much of a performance issue, but I like the idea of getting commonly used user attributes such as first name from an array, opposed to a query.
I still have some site/code housecleaning to do, with issues such as the one described above, as well as other behind the scene things, that needs to be done prior to making this splash page the live index page.
Hopefully by the end of today or in the next few days, these things will be done. I am pleased with the progress of integrating user login to the site. All of the work done now, will make the creation of future page/site content that takes advantage of user login, much quicker to create.