PHPBuilder: A Complete, Secure User Login System

[ Thanks to Kevin
Reichard for this link. ]

“When I started seeing spam messages posted to the new column
annotation system, I knew I would have to create some sort of user
authentication system that helps weed out the losers. I’m the type
that would rather write an entire library myself than try to learn
something like PHPLib or other similar libraries.”

“The library needed to handle registration, confirmation emails,
account updates (passwords, emails) among other things. It also
needed to be secure while not creating a burden on my overloaded
database….”

“The interesting thing about this system is that it could
scale up almost infinitely. Since the hard work of this system is
done by md5() on the web server, additional servers can be dropped
in incrementally to handle the load. The same is not true of
an auth system that hammers a database – the database itself
eventually becomes the bottleneck.”

Complete
Story