Passing parameters to second iteration of a page

Hi all,

I’ve been spinning my eyes on this for days.

I’m moving a hand-coded website into wordpress. One of the things people can do on the old site is look up other members by things like location (in this case, state). On the old site, this is done with one PHP program. The first pass through the program creates a list of the states that exist on the database. The user selects one of the states. The program then basically calls itself, passing the state, On this second pass, it creates a list of everyone who lives in that state.

I’ve been trying to bring this into wordpress. I created a template page with the same code in it that was in the original (minus the old menu and styling). I then created a wordpress page using that template page as its base.

I can get it to create a list of states just fine. When I choose a state, I can see that it’s properly coded to re-call itself:

lookup.php?page=123&state=DE

It does re-call itself, but it doesn’t see the state I passed to it. All it does is create another list of states. I found something in the documentation about adding state to the list of acceptable variables. I did that. No change.

Is this just impossible to do, or am I missing something?

TIA,
Tery