Taking the user back to the initial page after login?

Question

I'm using PHP, I wanted to know if a user lands on a certain page, and they have to login or signup to be able to do actions like commenting or rating etc. I wanted to able to take the user back to that same page after they login.

I was thinking to use the PHP get function and pass the URL, I'm not sure that's the best way to do it.

Answer 1

Presumably your login fields are in an html form. When you're constructing the form, put the current URI in a hidden input field, then you have the information available to you when you want to perform the redirect after the POST data has been submitted.

I don't typically use PHP without a framework, but here are some resources that will help you get this information:

http://www.webcheatsheet.com/PHP/get_current_page_url.php

How can I get the current page's full URL on a Windows/IIS server?

Basically, it goes like this:

$current_url = "http://" .$_SERVER['HTTP_HOST'] .$_SERVER['REQUEST_URI'];

But if you are using https, you have to change that string accordingly.

Answer 2

An alternative is to redirect them back to $_SERVER['HTTP_REFERER']. One thing to take into consideration is that the browser can choose not to send the Referer URL.