PHP 5 in Practice

12. Sessions and User Tracking Just as with form data input and handling, PHP provides an excellent and seamless interface to the common methods of tracking user sessions. This chapter starts with a description of cookies, expanding the conc...

12.1. Using Cookies to Remember Data Cookies have been part of the Internet since the Netscape browser introduced them in 1995. Since then, they have been the topic of many long discussions concerning privacy issues, most all of which have been re...

12.2. Saving User Data with Sessions The major drawbacks of using cookies for data storage are that you rely on the person allowing the cookie in the first place, and the amount of data you can store is somewhat limited. PHP sessions are a solut...

12.3. Customizing Display Settings for a User A common feature of websites, both for usability and for just providing a good user experience, is to allow the user to customize the display of the website. This can be as simple as offering different...

12.4. Creating a Library for Tracking a User Through Your Website Web server log files do not give you a true path that a single user has taken through your website. Although there are techniques to approximate this from the log file, they are v...

12.5. Implementing a Simple Shopping Cart The Web is filled with commercial websites selling their wares. All these websites share the concept of a shopping cart. As you browse the website you can add items to your shopping cart, and when you are ...

12.6. Passing Session Data Between Two Servers One intrinsic limitation of PHP sessions is that they are unique to that particular web server. If you have reason to use more than one web server and yet need to share data between them since they ar...

12.7. Parsing Specific Browser Information from Log Files Many third-party applications are available for parsing web server log files and giving you no end of statistics from them. However, there is still much that you may want to do on your ow...