Part 1: Create your own Registration System using PHP and MySql

This tutorial is a follow up to our previous tutorial Secure Login System with PHP and MySQL. In this tutorial, we’ll be creating a secure registration form and implementing basic validation.

A registration form is what your website’s visitors can use to register their details, which will subsequently be stored in a MySQL database.

1. Getting Started

There are a few steps we need to take before we create our secure registration system. We need to set-up our web server environment and make sure we have the required extensions enabled (skip if you followed the secure login system tutorial).

1.1. Requirements

• If you haven’t got a local web server set-up, you will need to download and install XAMPP. XAMPP is a server-side web development environment that includes the essentials for back-end web developers.

1.2. What You Will Learn in this Tutorial

• Form Design — Design a registration form with HTML5 and CSS3.
• Prepared SQL Queries — How to prepare SQL queries to prevent SQL injection and insert new records into a MySQL database.
• Basic Validation — Validating form data that is sent to the server (username, password, and email).

1.3. File Structure & Setup

We now need to start our web server and create the files and directories that we’re going to use for our registration system.

• Open XAMPP Control Panel
• Next to the Apache module click Start
• Next to the MySQL module click Start
• Navigate to XAMPPs installation folder (C:\xampp)
• Open the htdocs folder
• Create the following folders and files:

Each file will contain the following:

• register.html — Registration form created with HTML5 and CSS3. As this file doesn’t require us to use PHP, we’ll save it as plain HTML.
• style.css — The stylesheet (CSS3) for our secure registration form.
• register.php — Validate form data and insert a new account into the MySQL database.
• activate.php — Activate the user’s account with a unique code (email based activation).