PHP sessions with HTML

Question

I have a website which uses PHP and HTML pages, I want to create a session which stores a username from the login page. But the login pages are php and the next pages are html.

Is this a problem or can I just add a small statement of php into the html page saying

 <?PHP session_start();
$_session['loginid']=$_post['username'];
?>

Or am I doing it wrong?

This is the first time i've used sessions and they confuse me a little.

thanks for any help.

Answer 1

If you have access to your apache configuration, or a simple .htaccess file, you can tell Apache to handle php code inside of an .html file. You can do this by creating an .htaccess file (remember the . (dot) as the first character in that filename) on the document root of the site (probably public_html/) and putting this into it:

# Add this to public_html/.htaccess file
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .html
AddHandler application/x-httpd-php .htm

You should be able to reload the html page and your PHP code (from Michael Matthews answer) will run great.

Answer 2

You are trying to share a PHP session variable with a page that is of type text/html. As you suggested you must make the HTML page a PHP page for this to work and add a little snippet of PHP somewhere to display the user name.

Change your HTML page to PHP. At the top of the page add something like this:

<?php
  session_start(); // must be before any output
  $username = $_SESSION['username']; // or whatever you called it
  // check that $username is valid here (safe to display)
?>
html here
Hello <?= $username ?>!

Answer 3

As the sessions are handled by PHP, it needs PHP to maintain the state. You need at least session_start() to use the session variables stored in $_SESSION.