Registration and Activation Script in PHP

.oO(edwin@aw)

> I am creating an registration application. Prior to a successful registration,
>users must first activate their account from the provided email address in
>order to validate the provided email addresses. This application is powered by
>PHP script. Hoping someone could provide some concept about how this could be
>done and some tutorials will be appreciated. Thank you.

I can't provide code, just the idea how this is usually accomplished:

When the users registers or creates the account, a kind of a key is
generated. This can be a random string for example or an MD5 checksum of
the user name or something like that, let's take "crztgvhbjn" as an
example. This key is stored in the database along with the user data and
send to the user's email. In order to activate the account, the user has
to follow a particular link, which contains the key, e.g.

http://example.com/account/activate?key=crztgvhbjn

or (nicer URL)

http://example.com/account/activate/crztgvhbjn

Whatever. Then the script just has to check that the submitted key is
valid and activate the account.

Micha