Breakthrough!

Well, I didn't think I would make it, but thanks to Peter Martin's help I got there. I now have a fully functioning registration, login and logout function on my website. It took about 6 hours last night to work through it. In the end it was just a matter of one or two changes to the script. But it was a marathon effort.

Most of what occured is mentioned in my comments within the script, but really it was just a matter of working through each error message as they arose and dealing with them one by one. Most were very simple, such as leaving a comma in where it shouldn't be and knowing the correct field to include when using sessions and how those connected to other pages.

We really got bogged down in it after a while so, since I was pretty much using the same script as Ullman (Ullman, 2005, pp. 527-575), Peter suggested we download the script for the login and logout pages from his book and start again. Two things occurred at that moment:

1. I went into shock to discover that I could have downloaded the script from Ullman's website. I had spent a good part of a week typing up the script for each page thinking that was the only way I could get it into my notebook++. However, I was consoled when I realised that I learnt a heck of a lot of stuff by typing it up myself and figuring out what much of it meant.

2. I was reluctant to download it as I was fairly sure that I had typed it up pretty accurately (since I had gone through it so slowly when I did it) and that I had only made a few changes to the original script. However, I knew I was not infallable (I know, hard to believe isn't it!) so I agreed.

We spent the next several hours going through each line step by step and working out what the problems were when we tested it. It proved to be a really worthwhile exercise as this morning i was able to go through and comment on everything in more detail without much help from the text book.

Please note:

*The Reset Forgotten Password and the Change Password links and files do not function yet.

* Also, the link to the functioning website through geoffrey_multimedia is situated at the top righthand of this blog, titled The 'Raspberry Whirl' Website

A couple of things need to be addressed, but nothing that effects the register, login and logout functions. I will list them below to remind myself of what I need to look at over the next four weeks to get it functioning as I want.

1. Understand the output buffering and make sure it functions on the pages that it needs.
2. Sort out the issue with the 'Welcome, 'username' not showing up when a user logs in.
3. Understand more about sessions and cookies and make sure they are functioning properly on each page
4. Possibly address the issue of having to move the login form from the top menu bar to a separate page. I didn't have time to research how to make this dynamic while it sits in the header.html template.

There are also some major things that I will need to address, that I don't understand, to get my site working in the way I outlined in the design document.

They are:

1. How I am going to make the search recipe option dynamic, since it sits in the header.html template. Similare to point 4 above.
2. How I am going to write the script for the highly complicated 'Submit Recipe' form (I am really dreading this after my experience with the fairly simple login/logout forms).