Passing a variable value from WordPress pages to an external cgi application

Phil, thanks for your response. I haven’t spent a lot of time on this, but, today I dedicated a few hours and here is what I’ve come up with.

I’ve added into my functions.php file code to ‘register’ a query parm:

add_filter('query_vars', 'lg_queryvars' );
function lg_queryvars( $qvars ) {
  $qvars[] = 'ORDERNUMBER';
  return $qvars;
  }

and, in the page template, added a global variable $ORDER_NUMBER and the following code:

<?php $ORDER_NUMBER = $wp_query->query_vars['ORDERNUMBER'];
  echo $ORDER_NUMBER; ?>

(the echo is just so I can see that I’m retreiving it)

so that now, in the cgi I can craft a url that includes, at the end, the code ?ORDERNUMBER=12345 and the first wordpress page I go to can pick it up out of the url and display it. My thought is I’d like to keep the consistency in place, and simply pass the order number as part of the query string in all of the pages…

Now, I’m trying to figure out how to append the ?ORDERNUMBER=12345 on each url after that.

I’ve tried crafting the href as follows:

<a href="<?php echo add_query_arg('ORDERNUMBER',$ORDER_NUMBER,'http://allamericanmulch.curreyadkins.com/products/landscaping/rubber-mulch/shredded/'); ?>">

and the resulting html is broken, as when I view the source, I can see:

<a href="<?php echo add_query_arg('ORDERNUMBER',$ORDER_NUMBER,'http://allamericanmulch.curreyadkins.com/products/landscaping/rubber-mulch/shredded/'); ?>“>

with, of course, the ‘“’ resulting in the character ‘ ” ‘, and everything to the tag disappearing from the page 🙁

The site is really quite simple, mostly images, with a link to another page under each image. The href code above was entered via the admin page; again, being a php dunce, I ask the following questions:

a) does anyone familiar with the add_query_arg function see what I’ve done wrong above, and if so, could you give me a clue?

b) can the php function be embedded in the href?

and

c) since I’m trying to keep the site simple, with only one page template, am I out of my bloody mind? (that’s just a lil’ frustration, there)

Thanks in advance…..

Next update: after trying many, many, many different things, I’ve been able to retrieve the query parameter, and on each page, build the link to go to the next page and tack the query parameter on the end. Works ok (for a noob), and I’m sure there’s a much, much easier way to do this, but here’s what I did:

On each page, (again, using the Allow PHP in Posts and Pages plugin) I inserted the following code:

[php]global $order;
      global $href_1;
      $order=get_query_var(ORDERNUMBER);
      $href_1='"wood-mulch?ORDERNUMBER='.$order.'">';
 [/php]

which sets up the variables I need and pulls the value of the order in from the url. Then, in the html portion of the page, I changed the hardcoded url to:

<a href=[php]global $href_1;global $order;echo $href_1;[/php]</a>

(with all the other stuff that goes with the href tag). This worked great, and we were all doing the happy dance in our chairs.

Then, we decided that gosh! The first time into the site, the user won’t HAVE an order number, so the links really shouldn’t include the ?ORDERNUMBER= language. So, back to the editor, and we changed the code to this:

[php]global $order;
      global $href_1;
      $order=get_query_var(ORDERNUMBER);
      if ($order=="") {
        $href_1='"wood-mulch"';
      } else {
        $href_1='"wood-mulch?ORDERNUMBER='.$order.'">';
      }
 [/php]

and, immediately, everything is broken. We decided that the php code, as php code, is correct (and Please! tell me if I’m wrong), so, thought maybe the ‘}’ was botching things, and changed to escape it using the ‘\’ backslash. No luck.

So, removed the if statement, and placed it into a ‘snippet’, along with the global variable definition. Still no luck.

(sigh)….so, so close….