Are there any common pitfalls to avoid when developing dynamic content features in PHP?

One common pitfall to avoid when developing dynamic content features in PHP is not properly sanitizing user input. Failing to sanitize input can leave your application vulnerable to security risks such as SQL injection attacks. To mitigate this risk, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries when interacting with a database to prevent malicious input from being executed as code.

// Example of using prepared statements to sanitize user input
$stmt = $pdo->prepare('SELECT * FROM users WHERE username = :username');
$stmt->execute(['username' => $_POST['username']]);
$user = $stmt->fetch();