PHP: post to self, page variable not responding until a hard refresh - php

Question

I'm submitting a FORM to itself using action="" but what's odd is that my variables are updating after the submission.
<form action="" method="post">
<input type="text" name="username">
<input type="text" name="password">
<input type="submit">
</form>
Once this has been submitted and the user successfully logged in, the rest of the page doesn't seem to respond to the updated variables unless I hard refresh.
if ( isset($_POST['found_step_1']) ) {
global $wpdb;
// We shall SQL escape all inputs
$username = $wpdb->escape($_REQUEST['username']);
$password = $wpdb->escape($_REQUEST['password']);
$remember = $wpdb->escape($_REQUEST['rememberme']);
if ($remember) {
$remember = "true";
} else {
$remember = "false";
}
$login_data = array();
$login_data['user_login'] = $username;
$login_data['user_password'] = $password;
$login_data['remember'] = $remember;
$user_verify = wp_signon( $login_data, true );
if ( is_wp_error($user_verify) ) {
echo "Invalid username or password. Please try again!";
$current_step = 1;
} else {
//echo "<script type="text/javascript">window.location='". get_bloginfo('url') ."'</script>";
$current_step = 2;
}
$wpdb->flush();
}
When the page below renders... it's like it's rendering what WAS there before the POST ... the only way to get it to display what the latest data consists of is to hard refresh the page. It's really odd.

Answer 1

EDITED
You need to make the login process one of the first things your script does. I once had similar problems and then found out that I was making the login process too late in my script. I will put a practical pseudo-example that will NOT work as intended:
<?php
if (in_array("Maths",$Subjects) $MainSubject="Maths";
if ($_POST['name'] == "Admin" && $_POST['password'] == "MyCoolPassword!")
{
$Lang=en;
$Subjects = array ("Maths","Physics","English");
}
echo $MainSubject;
?>
This is a too simple code (and will throw some errors), so the mistake is easy to spot. But what if you are working with several includes, calling functions here and there and doing many things like this? Then the same mistake could occur at a large scale. Just one thought, but without more code from the OP we cannot really answer, just give some 'maybe it's this'.
Other thing that could go wrong is that cookies are set AFTER finishing parsing the php code, not at the instant that setcookie() is called in the code. A more throughout answer can be found here: php set cookie issue
what's odd is that my variables are updating after the submission. I guess you mean your variables are NOT updating right after the submission from the rest of the question, it's pretty unclear. Please post more code so we can help you better.