[thelist] php newbie question: cookies or not?

[Heather Ruggio]

I am trying to create a news page where an author can
sign in if they are already listed as an author, sign
up to become listed as an author, and enter an
article.  Then anyone can read the articles.  I was
originally going to do the first three pages as
separate php scripts, and set cookies to keep the
author information accessible.  That way, they would
sign in once, and then when submitting the article,
their id would automatically go in also.  Well, that
isn't working so well because I set the cookies and I
thought they were working fine, but the information
does not seem to be accessible to the script.

So I decided to do the third page as a separate
script, and just "include" it into the first two.  But
I having a hard time figuring out whether to include
it at the beginning (before html, title, header) and
the just use the functions I need in the body, or to
include it when I need it.  And then, I tried
inserting the functions where I needed them, and that
was a problem because it was within another function.

Please help!

Heather

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