I am desiging a new website for my company and I am trying to implement switch navigation which is what I have used on all my sites in the past.
<?php
switch($x) {
default:
include("inc/main.php");
break;
case "products":
include("inc/products.php");
break;
}
?>
For some reason when I go to index.php?x=products nothing happens, it still displays inc/main.php, in other words it hasn't detected the X variable from the URL. Is this something to do with global variables?
Yes, your PHP configuration has correctly got register_globals turned off, because that's incredibly insecure.
Just put:
$x = $_REQUEST['x']
at the top of your script.
You can also use $_GET if you specifically only want this to work for the GET HTTP method. I've seen some people claim that $_REQUEST is somehow insecure, but no evidence to back that up.
You should use $_GET to read out these variables. There is a deprecated function called register_globals, but I would definately not advise to use this, as it is a potential security risk.
It seems like your previous webhosts all used register_globals and your code relies on that. This is a dangerous setting and was rightfully removed in PHP 6.0! Use switch($_GET['x']) { instead.