I want to know if the user has logged in or not and then display different elements of the navigation based on the username (login by email and password Not username). However, I have no idea how to deal with session. If php and html is separated in two documents, how can I store the required values using session in php document and then get them using javascript in html document? Or should I use cookies instead?
2 Answers
There are a several approaches to do this.
1) You can make a PHP file which will format your $_SESSION data, and all the other data you want as a JSON string (json_encode function in PHP lang). Then use echo to return it. Then use an AJAX request to get this file from javascript or JQuery, and you will receive the data you want. That's a bad approach for this purpose, from my point of view, because after loading the page you send another request to receive a static data, which will not change on the page like email or username.
2) Better approach: PHP is preprocessor hypertext. You can make an php file and write html tags in it, with php output(example: <div><?=$_SESSION['email']?></div>). Search for more info in google ("php inside html").
3) Much better. In modern web programming world its a mistake to use php inside html because you should think not only about how to make something work, you should think how you will maintain it after 3, 6, 12 months later, too. If you use just php inside html in a big project, then, with time, you realize that your code is hard to read and looks ugly. There are plugins that can make your view more readable and maintainable (Twig, Blade, Volt and others). I recommend you use one of them.
Comments
The session is a server side thing, you cannot access it using javascript. You can write an Http handler (that will share the sessionid if any) and return the value from there using AJAX
document.cookieand then looking for PHPSESSID or whatever key you're using to name your cookie?