On the NETTUTS.com website there's a new screencast posted that looks at making a user creation and authentication system in about 30 minutes. The screencast talks about PHP, .htaccess, sessions and their choice for storing user data - an XML file.

Building an entire membership system can be a tedious, and time-consuming task. Tim Cooper is going to show us how to build the ENTIRE thing in roughly thirty minutes. Rather than using MYSQL as our database, Tim will instead demonstrate an alternate approach: using an XML file. We'll be reviewing PHP, .htaccess files, sessions, and more!

As always you can download the source to work with it all locally.