[mikegirouard]

You've almost got a point there except PHP has quite a few frameworks to choose from. Mainstream ones all include, as you put it, "basic security features like auto escaping output,orms by default(so no sql strings),csrf on forms".

Symfony2's form component is one of the best I've ever seen. It has many sane defaults and is locked down out of the box. Read up on their use of data transformers and how they protect users against XSS without any extra effort by the user. Validating automatically looks for a CSRF token.

Whats more is that these are (for the most part) stand-alone components. You don't need to commit entirely to the full Symfony stack - you can just opt into using the components you need -- even the smallest project that only uses PHP as a "templating language".