The Login Form

As the start page for our application, we will show a login form asking users for their username and password. The HTML source for the login form is show below, and Figure 15-2 shows the page rendered in a web browser:

<html>
 <head>
  <title>Jack and Jill's Wedding Gift Registry</title>
 </head>
 <body bgcolor='LIGHTBLUE'>
  <h2>Jack and Jill's Wedding Gift Registry</h2>
  (if you've not logged in before, make up a username and password)
   <form action="process.php" method="POST">
    <br />Please enter a username: <input type="text"     name="username" />
    <br />Please enter a password: <input type="password" name="password" />
    <br /><input type="submit" value="Log in" />
   </form>
 </body>
</html>

The wedding registry login pagewedding registry applicationwedding registry login page

Figure 15-2. The wedding registry login page

When the user types in information and clicks the Submit button, the form passes the data to the script specified in the form action attribute; in our example, the data is sent to the script process.php.

Our form has three input fields: username, password, and submit. Since the form submits the data using the POST method, we can look inside the $_POST superglobal array in process.php to access the corresponding values as $_POST["username"], $_POST["password"], and $_POST["submit"]. The data from the submit field will just be Log In (as specified in the form), and this field isn’t very useful; however, it’s important to know that it exists.

Using One Script ...

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