What are the best practices for handling form submissions and data processing in PHP scripts to avoid errors like incorrect timestamp storage?

When handling form submissions and data processing in PHP scripts, it is important to ensure that the correct data types are used for storing timestamps to avoid errors like incorrect timestamp storage. One way to solve this issue is to use the PHP `date()` function to generate a valid timestamp string before storing it in the database.

// Get the current timestamp in the correct format
$timestamp = date('Y-m-d H:i:s');

// Store the timestamp in the database
$query = "INSERT INTO table_name (timestamp_column) VALUES ('$timestamp')";
// Execute the query