PHP Cookbook

8.26. Program: Website Account (De)activator

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 them to visit a verification URL, shown in Example 8-4. The second, shown in Example 8-5, 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 8-6.

Here’s the SQL to create the table that user information is stored in:

CREATE TABLE users (
 email VARCHAR(255) NOT NULL,
 created_on DATETIME NOT NULL,
 verify_string VARCHAR(16) NOT NULL,
 verified TINYINT UNSIGNED
);

You probably want to store more information than this about your users, but this is all that’s needed to verify them. When creating a user’s account, save information to the users table, and send the user an email telling them how to verify their account. The code in Example 8-4 assumes that user’s email address is stored in the variable $email.

Example 8-4. notify-user.php

// generate verify_string $verify_string = ''; for ($i = 0; $i < 16; ...