If you are building a web application or website, there’s a big chance you want your visitors to register for certain features, and to login to visit user-only pages. Instead of writing your own code for this, you can also choose to use open source and free user management systems from the web.

When you have enough programming skills to write your own code, and you know how to make it secure, I think you should write the code yourself, as you have a lot more influence in the way the system is build and it will fit better into your application. But, when you are new to programming, it’s a good idea to start with the code of someone else. Unfortunately many of these free user management systems on the Internet are insecure and poorly written, so it’s recommended not to use just any code you can find on the Internet.

But now there is UserCake, a good example of a PHP user management system, which is easy to implement in your application and comes with support for usergroups, account activation, email templates, and SHA1 hash for security.

The only requirements for UserCake are PHP5 and MySQL.