The Paragon Initiative has posted an article to their blog talking about how to build secure applications in PHP. Rather than try to get into the specifics of specific vulnerabilities, they stay relatively high level and stick with concepts to keep in mind and steps you can follow to ensure your development practices are secure.

Whether you're planning the development of a brand new application or trying to prevent legacy code from causing a costly data breach, if you're going to be writing PHP, where should you begin? That is the question we will attempt to answer, in detail.

The article starts with an "easy way out" for those that don't feel like they know enough or just don't have the resources they need: hire consultants. With that out of the way, the article mentions two root causes for insecure apps: lack of knowledge about security and bad development habits. They then get into some suggestions about how you can learn to understand and prevent vulnerabilities in your own applications. They focus in on a few key places for PHP developers to pay attention to, complete with some charts showing the parts of the flow. The post ends with some advice on what do to if your site is compromised anyway and how to move forward.