What are some common pitfalls to avoid when creating a web portal using PHP?

One common pitfall to avoid when creating a web portal using PHP is not properly sanitizing user input, which can lead to security vulnerabilities such as SQL injection attacks. To avoid this, always use prepared statements or parameterized queries when interacting with a database. 

// 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();

Keywords

SQL injection XSS attacks CSRF protection session management error handling

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