New on Developer.com today there's a tutorial looking at creating complex, secure forms with the HTML_QuicForm2 PEAR package. This package will give you more control over the form, the validation it performs and the overall security it automatically handles.

For PHP developers, HTML_QuickForm2 PEAR package provides a programmatic interface for rigorously defining form controls, value requirements, and user notifications. Using HTML_QuickForm2 helps these developers create usable and secure Web forms without sacrificing visual appeal. This solution takes much of the guesswork out of secure forms development, allowing you to create robust forms with minimal time investment. In this article, I show you how to take advantage of HTML_QuickForm2 to streamline the creation and validation of complex HTML forms.

They help you get the package installed (if all goes well, it's just a call with the "pear" command-line tool) and how to create a simple form for accepting a user's name and email address. They modify it a bit to create another example - one that takes in a preferred format for the email that would be sent over to the user. They also work in the concept of required fields and how to show the error messages that might result from those being empty.