Passing a form variable to a template

[TerryMason]

I'm a rookie with php, and having a hard time getting a variable passed to my template.

I have template1, with this code in it:

<form action="template2_file.php" method="post"> enter your data here: <input name="variable" type="text"/> <input type="submit" Label="submit"/></form>

and I'd expect the variable to be passed in the title, and be avaliable as the variable $variable. I'd like to display an image like

path/to/image/ $variable .jpg on the next page.

Is this possible? I've tried using plugins, but couldn't get that to work.