Hello. I am trying to do something quite basic. As I am new to php,everything seems complicated. What I want to do is the following: I have two frames, on the left frame a user logs in. After this, I want the page that the user goes to appear on the right frame. I know how to do this in html, but to do this in php, I am not sure what the syntax is. Thank you.
PHP is just the server side processing language... that spits out html. I suspect that you'll want the login form to have a target frame of _top and reload everything on login. The main frame will then load with the new "logged in" version on the left, and the user info on the right. The login details will be saved in cookies or a session and available to every new page the user calls. check out www.php.net/sessions and get some sample classes for logins from www.phpclasses.org
The most basic thing you could do is to add a "target" parameter set to the name of the right frame to the log-in form and make a seperate php script (file) for the right frame which handles the data received from the form and then displays the content, but I am not sure whether this is the best method to do it as I don't know the specific situation. IMHO setting the target to "_top" is a method that works but is either totally unsafe or tedious, because either any private data to the frames would have to be passed using parameters of the "GET" method (which is asking for trouble) or each script would have to run its own user-identification and data would have to be moved back and forth from a database (which would mean long execution times). So if you really want to secure your user's privacy and do it effectively, I suggest to either use my method or (even better) to dump frames alltogether for such sections in your page.
I agree with eps, unless you have a really strong reason, I'd advise against frames. They're old-fashioned looking (ugly) and will just complicate things.