I have a standalone PHP web app which consists of several pages in a checkout style process, the user posts a form on each page to the next with the collected data.
I am trying to port this to a Facebook Canvas app.
What is the best practice for posting forms from page to page in a Canvas app? Should I just post as normal with a form target of _self? If I do that though I understand I might not get the signed request on each page.
Correct, when you form post to _self, then you will not get a signed_request. You should hold the user information in some server side storage such as a session object.