How can a beginner in PHP avoid common mistakes when trying to create a forum with basic functionality?

Beginners in PHP can avoid common mistakes when creating a forum with basic functionality by properly sanitizing user input to prevent SQL injection attacks, implementing user authentication to ensure only authorized users can access or modify the forum, and using prepared statements to interact with the database securely.

// Sanitize user input to prevent SQL injection
$username = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $_POST['username']);
$password = mysqli_real_escape_string($conn, $_POST['password']);

// Implement user authentication
if ($username == 'admin' && $password == 'password') {
    // User is authenticated
} else {
    // User authentication failed
}

// Use prepared statements to interact with the database securely
$stmt = $conn->prepare("INSERT INTO posts (title, content) VALUES (?, ?)");
$stmt->bind_param("ss", $title, $content);
$stmt->execute();
$stmt->close();