How to Code a Signup Form With Email Confirmation

This tutorial will guide you to create a user registration form that adds the user to the database and then sends a confirmation email that the user must click on to activate their account.

Create registration form from scratch

This section will explain step by step in building a custom registration form from scratch. First, I've attached all the code files for you to download so that you can follow the tutorial.

Let's take a quick look at important files:

• index.php: This is the main file used to build and display the registration form. It also processes the submission of forms.
• confirm.php: Used to process the confirmation part.
• signup_template.html: This is an HTML file template used to build the HTML email body.
• signup_template.txt: This is a plain text file template used to build a plain text email body.
• inc/php/config.php: Contains database connection information.

The rest of the files are auxiliary files.

Open PHPMyAdmin or any program you use to manage the MySQL database and create a new database. You can name it as you like, but I'll name it email_signup. Now we need to create a schema that will save our user information and confirmation information. To do this, we will create two tables: users and confirm.

CREATE TABLE `users` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `username` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '',
  `password` varchar(128) NOT NULL default '',
  `email` varchar(250) NOT NULL default '',
  `active` binary(1) NOT NULL default '0',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

The above MySQL statement will create a table named users.

• id: An integer sequence that is used as a unique identifier for the user. It is defined as int(11), which means it can hold up to 11 bit integers.
• username: A string column that stores the username of each user. It is defined as varchar(50), which means it can save up to 50 characters.
• password: A string column that stores the hash password for each user. It is defined as varchar(128), which means it can hold up to 128 characters.
• email: A string column that stores each user's email address. It is defined as varchar(250), which means it can save up to 250 characters.
• active: A binary column that stores whether the user's account has been activated. It is defined as binary(1), which means it stores a byte value, 0 means inactive and 1 means activated.

confirmTable:

CREATE TABLE `confirm` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `userid` varchar(128) NOT NULL default '',
  `key` varchar(128) NOT NULL default '',
  `email` varchar(250) default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

The above MySQL statement will create a table named confirm.

• id: An integer sequence that is used as a unique identifier for confirming the record. It is defined as int(11), which means it can hold up to 11 bit integers.
• userid: A string column that stores the user ID associated with the confirmation record. It is defined as varchar(128), which means it can hold up to 128 characters.
• key: A string column that stores the confirmation key sent to the user's email address. It is defined as varchar(128), which means it can hold up to 128 characters.

Connect to MySQL database using mysqli

This section will explain how to use the mysqli extension to connect to a MySQL database.

Let us quickly extract and understand the code of the inc/php/config.php file.

CREATE TABLE `users` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `username` varchar(50) NOT NULL default '',
  `password` varchar(128) NOT NULL default '',
  `email` varchar(250) NOT NULL default '',
  `active` binary(1) NOT NULL default '0',
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

First, we create a new mysqli connection. Then, we check if the connection is successful. If the connection fails, an error message is displayed and exits.

Form Submission Processing

This section will explain how form submission works.

... (Some codes are omitted here, because this part of the code in the original text is lengthy and inconsistent with the pseudo-original goal, so just keep the core logic)...

The main logic is: safely process user input (for example, use mysqli_real_escape_string function to prevent SQL injection), verify that the user input is complete, insert user data into the database, generate a confirmation key, and send a confirmation email. Passwords are hashed using md5 function, and it is recommended to use a more secure encryption method.

Show form confirmation

Let's extract important code snippets from the confirm.php file to understand how it works.

CREATE TABLE `confirm` (
  `id` int(11) NOT NULL auto_increment,
  `userid` varchar(128) NOT NULL default '',
  `key` varchar(128) NOT NULL default '',
  `email` varchar(250) default NULL,
  PRIMARY KEY  (`id`)
) ENGINE=InnoDB DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8;

This code mainly checks whether there is a mailbox and confirmation key in the database that matches the URL parameters. If present, update the user status to activated and delete the confirmation record.

Conclusion

This tutorial ends here.

In this tutorial, we cover many different aspects. We downloaded and included third-party scripts for processing emails, implemented simple form validation, and created a simple template system to style emails. If you are not familiar with MySQL, we've covered three of the most common functions, so you should be able to easily complete more advanced tutorials.

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