Mark Hensler — Thu, 14 Sep 2000 05:17:48 +0000

so... if the user closes their browser, and comes back within time, how does the server know what session to match it with?

123finder.com — Wed, 13 Sep 2000 20:34:30 +0000

Notice that session is NOT lost when you/ your visitors close the browser!

And yes, I think it would expire after about 15-20mins (I don't know exactly, just about that)

You could use session management and specify the method is cookie instead of temp files, db,...

gokhan — Wed, 13 Sep 2000 09:09:35 +0000

sessions last 20 minutes if i am not wrong. and do not trust sessions.

Mark Hensler — Wed, 13 Sep 2000 05:31:16 +0000

forgot to mention...
any cookies you set in PHP are only accessable to PHP pages. This means that you may have to convert many of your pages to PHP. If you do this, be sure to double check your links!

Mark Hensler — Wed, 13 Sep 2000 05:29:32 +0000

session are nice (and at times, life-savers), but I don't think they'd be of help here.

If a user signs up and get a username/password. then closes his browser, the session is lost. Cookies are the only alternative. And if the user has cookies turned off, they have no choice but to type and re-type the info.

123finder.com — Wed, 13 Sep 2000 04:23:05 +0000

But don't rely on cookies since the user could turn them off
If your host supports php4, use session management, which is very easy and basically it does use cookies (and other methods too!)

Mark Hensler — Sun, 10 Sep 2000 23:22:23 +0000

you can read more about setcookie here:
http://php.net/manual/function.setcookie.php

Mark Hensler — Sun, 10 Sep 2000 23:20:41 +0000

I don't have time to write the whole thing out, but here is the syntx for a cookie..

setcookie("CookieName", "Value", "TimeUntilExpire");

snippet from my site:

if (isset($NewUserName)) { // User name
setcookie(UserName, $NewUserName, time()+(60*60*24*365));
}

There are more parameters, but they are not necessary. This cookie expires in one year.

You need to set one cookie for each variable you want to save on the visitors machine. The name of the cookie will the the name of the variable next time they visit.

in the HTML, you'll want something like:

<input type=text value="<? if (isset($UserName)) echo $UserName; ?>">

Good luck,