When users sign up for your web site, it's helpful to know that they've provided you with a correct email address. To validate the email address they provide, send an email to the address they supply when they sign up. If they don't visit a special URL included in the email after a few days, deactivate their account. This system has three parts. The first is the notify-user.php program that sends an email to a new user and asks that user to visit a verification URL, shown in Example 8-42. The second, shown in Example 8-43, is the verify-user.php page that handles the verification URL and marks users as valid. The third is the delete-user.php program that deactivates accounts of users who don't visit the verification URL after a certain amount of time. This program is shown in Example 8-44. Example 8-41 contains the SQL to create the table in which the user information is stored. SQL for user verification table
What's in Example 8-41 is the minimum amount of information necessary for user verification. You probably want to store more information than this about your users. When creating a user's account, save information to the users table, and send the user an email telling him how to verify his account. The code in Example 8-42 assumes that the user's email address is stored in the variable $email. notify-user.php
The verification page that users are directed to when they follow the link in the email message updates the users table if the proper information has been provided, as shown in Example 8-43. verify-user.php
The user's verification status is updated only if the email address and verify string provided match a row in the database that has not already been verified. The last step is the short program that deletes unverified users after the appropriate interval, as shown in Example 8-44. delete-user.php
Run the program in Example 8-44 once a day to scrub the users table of users that haven't been verified. If you want to change how long users have to verify themselves, adjust the value of $window, and update the text of the email message sent to users to reflect the new value. |