Security is not a relevant topic for beginners trying to learn how to do things. Let’s be realistic, do you really think a newbie stumbled on to this tutorial to develop an online banking platform? (Wouldn’t shock me, actually, but I doubt this was the writer’s target).

A newb is more likely to build a little “Hello World” site or display pictures of his kids using this. So it is open to SQL injection, sure… but when the newb finds that PedoBear has been superimposed into the photos of his kids, he will hone his security skills.

Any serious developer takes a more robust course on professional development, followed by occasional security refreshers. Everyone knows this.

Now… No one who works with open source technologies should dare bash another for freely sharing knowledge. Ever. Correct mistakes out of respect for the readers, but don’t bash the author. He’s merely trying to contribute to the community. That’s what open source is all about.

Thank you very much!!!

On the article, I will not mention some of the previous comments but:
– OOP. Cleaner code and good practice – if done right. If you are going to show a technique, please utilize it correctly. If any of these users study more into OOP, hen they would be disappointed to see thy cannot fully utilize what you have taught them.
– SQL. SELECT * FROM.. is slow and bad practice when your application gets bigger. Please use SELECT this, that FROM.. instead, you don’t want to do full table searches.

OOP – You note that it is good practice to use OOP, but you are not using OOP effectively in your example nor teaching it correctly. When users begin learning about furthering OOP practices and trying it out on your example, they will get frustrated because it doesn’t work. You have a super class that combines alot of functions. You can’t extend this class like so:

class blah extends simpleCMS { }

SELECT * FROM… is slow and bad practice. Start new users right! When your application gets bigger then your mysql queries will take longer because mysql has to search through the entire table to get the 1 (or 2) things you need. Try:

SELECT title, bodytext FROM….

Why did you user HEREDOC instead of echoing strings or breaking out of PHP?
Curly braces should be always be used. Google “PHP Coding Standards” or I recommend this from Evolt.org