Is there a way that I can initiate a persistent session in PHP without the placement of a session cookie? Are there other ways of maintaining a session across pages, such as an IP address-based solution?
My reason for asking is, is that although most users have cookies on, I want to see if there’s a way for a login system to work for those with it disabled (even though I think disabling cookies is just unnecessary paranoia, personally).
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Answer
I don’t think it’s too much to ask your users to enable cookies. I find it silly when people turn them off entirely.
Otherwise, you can set your session.use_only_cookies to “0” to force the appendage of a session ID to URLs within your php. This approach, however, has several draw backs. Mainly that of keeping the state within the URL, as opposed to the Cookie header. If a user were to copy and paste the URL of the page they were on, and someone else were to click on it, they would both be using the same session.
<?php
ini_set("session.use_cookies", 0);
ini_set("session.use_only_cookies", 0);
ini_set("session.use_trans_sid", 1);
ini_set("session.cache_limiter", "");
session_start();