why are form variables not available in this php code?

Question

I have a form on my PHP page which performs some ajax validation (that's working). Here's a snippet (the live form has more fields than this)

    <form name="form" onSubmit="return validate_form();" action="submitform.php" method="post">
        <table border="0" cellpadding="5" bgcolor="#000000">
        <tr>
            <td width="175">
                <div align="right"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><b>Requested Vendor TAG:</b> </font></div>
            </td>
            <td>
                <input type="text" name="VendorTAG" onblur="checktag();" maxlength="8"> <div id="vendtag"></div>
            </td>
        </tr>
        <tr>
            <td width="175">
                <div align="right"><font face="Verdana, Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif" size="2"><b>Contact Name:  </b> </font></div>
            </td>
            <td>
                <input type="text" name="ContactName" maxlength="50">
            </td>
        </tr>

When I click the submit button, it loads this code:

<php ?
if(trim($VendorTAG) == '')
   {
      die('Vendor TAG cannot be blank');
   }
   else if(trim($ContactName) == '')
   {
      die('Contact Name cannot be blank');
   }
?>

(again, there's more of the same, but this illustrates the point)

This all worked perfectly well until the last update from my hoster sometime over christmas, when the form stopped working - but I'm having real difficulty in finding out why..

The server is now running PHP 5.2.11 - am I doing something fundamentally wrong/stupid here?

Answer 1

In PHP 5.2 They got rid of register_globals. It is a security nightmare and should not be used.

Use $_POST instead to access Form Elements.

You can find more about register_globals here: http://us.php.net/manual/en/security.globals.php

Answer 2

POST vars are accessed like this: $_POST["varname"] and not like this: $varname. Alternatively, you can also access them through $_REQUEST too, but ultimately it's up to you.