Showing part of a page only for logged in users

I"m trying开发者_如何学C to knock up a very a way to show part of a page, only when a user is logged in, using cookies. Any idea on how to proceed?

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Sessions? http://www.php.net/manual/en/book.session.php

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Remeber that cookies can be disabled in the browser. Use the $_SESSION variable instead of cookies.

In my Authentication class all users are stored in a database with an access level. On each page the Authentication class uses the $_SESSION variable to get the loged in user and retrieve him/her from the database into a user object. If no one is loged in a default user object for guests are used instead.

In the HTML generation I only check access level before generating "protected" data.

if ($User->AccessLevel >= 30) {

  // stuff only available to users with access level 30 and higher

}

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if(isset($_COOKIE['example-cookie']))
  show_stuff_for_logged_in_users();

And to set cookie use setcookie().

Although keep in mind that user can manually set cookies so can't trust them. Using sessions would be better.