What is the best way to handle user login with mysql and sessions?

if your server is PHP then yes, sessions are a good way of creating client areas.

Yes it is php ... any examples or tutorials?

Managing Users With PHP Sessions and MySQL

sitepoint is awesome. altho i didn't really agree with that article

do you have anything that I can reference?

Basically all you need to do is register variables as session when they login

So lets say, if you had the information in a database you'd query the database to get the username/passwords, then match it against what they put in. If it is correct then just do something like this

PHP Code:

$_SESSION['USERNAME'] = $sqlrow['USERNAME'];
$_SESSION['PASSWORD'] = $sqlrow['PASSWORD'];
$_SESSION['USERID'] = $sqlrow['USERID']; 


And include any other variables that you want to check through every page.
Then in each page that requires login just have this

PHP Code:

if (!session_is_registered("USERID"))
{
    session_destroy();
    header("Location: login.php");
} 


And when you want to check the variables you can just use

PHP Code:

$_SESSION['VAR'] 


Also, to logout just use session_destroy(); and it dumps all session variables.

Hope this is of any help.