email verification on registration

[joedt]

I am using Dreamweaver 8 and have created a user registration page in php. New users register with their email address as username, choose a password etc. This works fine and registration takes place and users can then use login page to login.
When a new user register, I want an automatic email be send to that user's email with a verification link which he must click on before he can login for the first time (similar to facebook registration).
Can anyone please advice me on what to do in simple terms please

[Newsgroup_User]

Simplest way would be to have a column called (for example) confirmed on
your user table in your database that is set by default to "N".
When your new user registers send an email to them as you say, which has a
link to your confirmation page (for example) confirmreg.php and within the
url querystring you send to your user have a couple of unique IDs (for
example) the record ID of the user account and their email address.
When they click on the link and go to confirmreg.php you can update the
confirmed column to Y using the Unique IDs mentioned earlier in your SQL
WHERE clause.
After that when your user logs in you can check that the confirmed column is
set to "Y".

An example of the URL would be
http://www.yourdomain.com/confirmreg.php?ID=9999&EMAIL=username@domain.com

HTH
Bren