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Component 3 – Forgot Password

A registered user may forget his password to log into the website’s system. In this case, the user will need to supply his loginid for the system to retrieve his password and send the password to the user’s registered email address.

This is typically done through a simple HTML form. This HTML form typically contains 1 field and 2 buttons:

• A login id field
• A Submit button
• A Reset button

Assume that such a form is coded into a file named forgot.html. The following HTML code excerpt is a typical example. When the user has filled in all the fields, the forgot.php page is called when the user clicks on the Submit button.

[form name="forgot" method="post" action="forgot.php"]
[input name="login id" type="text" value="loginid" size="20"/][br]
[input type="submit" name="submit" value="submit"/]
[input type="reset" name="reset" value="reset"/]
[/form]

The following code excerpt can be used as part of forgot.php to process the login request. It connects to the MySQL database and queries the table used to store the registration information.

@mysql_connect("localhost", "mysql_login", "mysql_pwd") or die("Cannot connect to DB!");
@mysql_select_db("tbl_login") or die("Cannot select DB!");
$sql="SELECT password, email FROM login_tbl WHERE loginid=’".$loginid.”’”;
$r = mysql_query($sql);
if(!$r) {
$err=mysql_error();
print $err;
exit();
}
if(mysql_affected_rows()==0){
print "no such login in the system. please try again.";
exit();
}
else {
$row=mysql_fetch_array($r);
$password=$row["password"];
$email=$row["email"];

$subject="your password";
$header="from: This e-mail address is being protected from spam bots, you need JavaScript enabled to view it ";
$content="your password is ".$password;
mail($email, $subject, $row, $header);

print "An email containing the password has been sent to you";

}

As in component 1, the code excerpt assumes that the MySQL table that is used to store the registration data is named tbl_login and contains 3 fields – the loginid, password and email fields. The value of the $loginid variable is passed from the form in forgot.html using the post method.

Conclusion

The above example is to illustrate how a very basic login system can be implemented. The example can be enhanced to include password encryption and additional functionality – e.g. to allow users to edit their login information.

About the Author

This article is written by daBoss. daBoss is the Webmaster of Designer Banners. daBoss can be contacted at sales (at) designerbanners (dot) com.
http://www.designerbanners.com/