What are the best practices for storing user preferences, such as design choices, in PHP applications without requiring a login?

When storing user preferences in PHP applications without requiring a login, one common approach is to use cookies to store the preferences on the user's device. Cookies can be set with a long expiration time to persist the preferences across sessions. Another option is to use browser local storage or session storage to store the preferences on the client side. 

// Set user preferences in a cookie
$preferences = ['theme' => 'dark', 'language' => 'en'];
setcookie('user_preferences', json_encode($preferences), time() + (86400 * 30), '/');

// Retrieve user preferences from cookie
if(isset($_COOKIE['user_preferences'])) {
    $user_preferences = json_decode($_COOKIE['user_preferences'], true);
    // Use $user_preferences['theme'] and $user_preferences['language'] in your application
}

Keywords

sessions cookies local storage client-side server-side

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