I agree with what Craige said. The way my site is setup the user can pick between sessions and cookies depending on which method he/she feels most comfortable and secure with. You shouldn't have to use an if-else or ternary construction each time you want to check, though.
As Craige demonstrated you can set your own SUPERGLOBAL that is included throughout your program and inevitably its faster and much easier to maintain. He gave you a sample code and I can show you what is easiest in my experience.
On my site, I use a SUPERGLOBAL similar to what he (Craige) demonstrated. Here is a sample code, depending on how many session/cookie vars you set you can decide if they're logged in with sessions, cookies, or not logged in at all.
$_TYPE = ( isset($_SESSION['username']) && isset($_SESSION['password']) )
? $_SESSION : $_COOKIE;
If you paste that code into your favorite text editor (php coder, Dreamweaver, etc) and delete the new line before the ? operator it seems to look a lot cleaner.
Anywho, after you decide if they're logged in via cookies or sessions you can run a series of checks (usually with one on-the-fly function) to see if they're actually logged in. Like so:
function is_user() {
if ( !isset($_TYPE['username']) || !isset($_TYPE['password']) ) {
// Not logged in
return false;
}
// Check for their entry in MySQL or other DB (I demonstrate with MySQL)
$sql_check = "SELECT username FROM users WHERE password = '" . addslashes($_TYPE['password']) . "' AND username = '" . addslashes($_TYPE['username']) . "' LIMIT 1";
$get_user = mysql_query($sql_check);
if ( mysql_num_rows($get_user) == 0 ) {
// No record found
return false;
}
return true;
} // End function
That would be a very simple function to test if the user is logged in, of course with anything in scripting/programming the only limits are your imagination, wants, needs, and desires.
If you have any other questions let me know. I'd say use both as many will tell you. Some users hate having to type their information in over and over to log back into a site and in turn it makes them not want to login as much. On the other hand, people who like sessions don't want to have to press LOGOUT each time they quit browsing the site as to prevent a younger sibling (or anyone else) from wrongfully accessing their settings.
A good website lets the users choose as much as possible (within the parameters of site security and server security of course). Just experiment and fall in love with the easy compatibility.
