Global Variable Issues

Through past releases of PHP, I've developed with global variables on. These days it's becoming the trend, for security & asthetics purposes, to turn global variables off... Let's say I have a $status variable that changes depending upon the user's actions on the previous page and displays a message... Is there a way to propagate this variable through pages without 1) declaring it as a global, 2) writing it to a cookie, 3) passing it through the URL or 4) passing it through a form w/ POST? 1-globals are now off 2-cookie writing is impracical & no desire to store 1 time information client side 3-displaying the status message in the URL (or a status id) would look unprofessional and allow for user manipulation of the message they see by editing the URL string 4-not all my site's page transitions occur through forms, so I see no way to use $_POST every time I appreciate any suggestions & hearing your thoughts, Cam