This three-page online tutorial/article talks about managing user session and authntication using PHPLIB, a set of PHP classes designed to make is easier to develop web based PHP applications.

This tutorial sows you how a simple php login system is created.

This tutorial will teach you how to create your own login system with PHP, using sessions and the PEAR::DB classes. Want to password protect your pages and only allow members to see them? Then read this.

The logic (and method) behind adding an e-mail validation system to an existing PHP user registration system

This is a short tutorial that explains how you can protect a web page from users. The code in this tutorial is only about 5 lines long, and will protect any PHP page. HTTP Authentication involves the browser displaying a window for the user to log in, once the user logs in the page is displayed. If the user fails to log in, a failure notice is displayed.

This tutorial teaches you to initiate user authentication using PHP, and then to authenticate users by matching the value of the global variables $PHP_AUTH_USER, and $PHP_AUTH_PW to a list of valid usernames and passwords. The sample code included with this tutorial will show you how to use either hard-coded values, a flat file, an existing .htpasswd file or a database table to manage your valid usernames and passwords. This tutorial is intended for the PHP programmer who is generally familiar with authentication, but who would be interested in learning a practical method for authenticating access to one or more Web site pages.

This is a short tutorial on how to use the sessions (in PHP4) with a user, form-based login. This would be useful for just about any site where you had a "members only" area and wanted to validate the users from a database or anything else. The examples used authorize off of a MySQL database on the same server.

HTTP as a protocol is stateless, which doesn't make it easy for a developer. For example, your web server sends out a page to someone ordering from an online shop, and then forgets all about it. A few seconds later, the same person sends another request, ordering another item. As far as the web server is concerned, it could be an entirely different person. So to make sure the right orders are associated with the right person, a developer has to employ some sneaky tricks. Before PHP4, you could have used something like PHPLIB for session management. But PHP4 comes with a complete set of sessioning functions. This article explains how to use them.

One of the new great features with PHP4 is the session management feature. It allows you to store variables in a session 'object' during a user visit. This article discusses what a session and a session variable are, and what it can do.