To continue their series on user authentication, DevShed has the latest in the series posted - User Authentication With patUser (part 3).

In this new article, shows a few of the more advanced things you can do with the patUser system: [it] also includes a number of utility functions that can come in handy for certain specialized tasks. These functions include identifying users and groups by different criteria (such as name or email address); keeping track of the URLs visited by the user so as to generate a user trail; maintaining user account statistics for auditing purposes; and providing exception-handling routines for more graceful error handling.

Overall, this series has been good, providing a pretty good starting point for someone just looking to add a user login box to their site - and looking to do as little work as possible to create the scripts to manage their users.