What are common pitfalls when creating a messaging system in PHP?

One common pitfall when creating a messaging system in PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can lead to security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection or cross-site scripting attacks. To prevent this, always use prepared statements when interacting with a database to prevent SQL injection, and use functions like htmlentities() or htmlspecialchars() to escape user input when displaying it on a webpage. 

// Example of using prepared statements to prevent SQL injection
$stmt = $pdo->prepare("SELECT * FROM messages WHERE id = :id");
$stmt->bindParam(':id', $messageId, PDO::PARAM_INT);
$stmt->execute();

// Example of escaping user input when displaying it on a webpage
echo htmlentities($userInput);

Keywords

SQL injection cross-site scripting message queue PHPMailer error handling

Related Questions