Over on DevArticles.com this morning, they have a new piece that talks about using PHP to generate custom session handling scripts for your pages.
PHP's session handling functions are OK, but what if you wanted to create your own sessions? In this article I will teach you how to create and maintain your own customized sessions. You will have complete control over how your session handles the data and how it fetches the data to make it available in your scripts.
This one's only really for those out there with lots of PHP under their belt, and isn't any easy thing for a beginner. Anytime you remake something that PHP already has, you can count on it being a bit difficult, but this article takes you through the steps wonderfully and shows you all the code and all of the theory behind it to help you not only create the script, but understand how it all works. Their sessions use a MySQL backend to hold the information on each user, with spots for a timeout, an IP, and, of course, the session information.
If you've ever find yourself needing more than just the basic PHP session handlers can provide, I'd strongly suggest that you check out this article and see if their solution in right for you.