I'm starting studying PHP 5 (I always used PHP 4) and for this, I'm building a small (really easy) CMS. I saw in the manual that they added functions to filter vars. My CMS must handle some HTML content for the content of pages. Are these functions (filter_input, filter_var, ecc..) with sanitize filters enough? Or do I need to build a deeper custom function?
Yes, it's almost always enough to use them. However, depending on each query you do or each page content you show, keep in mind that not-so-special characters can also cause surprises. Briefly,
Sanitizers will do the rest for you (filtering low characters, etc).