If you've ever tried to track your users on your site, you know how difficult things can get. Setting cookies all over the place, and using them to keep a login going - and what about security issues? There's so much to worry about, but for those just getting started, DevArticles has some tips that might pave your way to better user recognition.

In this new piece, User identification using cookies in PHP/MySQL (they always have such original titles), they show you how, from the very start, to create a system that will allow you to store information for your user, and make the "members only" section of your site easier to get to. Of course, they give some common pitfalls that you need to be sure to look into before putting this kind of system in place on your site.

Cookies are a great way to keep things simple for your site's members - we even try to use them here, but they can get to be more trouble than their worth. Remember, everything you store in a cookie is *NOT* secure. They can be opened by anyone with access to the client machine - encryption is your friend.