Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for phpMyAdmin

The phpMyAdmin thing on Flattr has been around already for some time. I just created it together with other my stuff and somehow did not find time to discuss it with other project members and push it to our website. Despite this fact it got some attention and even recommendations.

Today, being pushed by Linus Olsson from Flattr (who just forwarded questions about authenticity of phpMyAdmin on Flattr), I finally find time to get an agreement from other project members and placed the button on phpMyAdmin's website.

Let's see how popular it will become now :-).

I've just set up another database to phpMyAdmin demo server - Drizzle. At first attempt phpMyAdmin did not work at all, but after few fixes (basically disabling all charsets/collation handling we do on connect), we're at least able to connect and show the interface with some databases and tables.

However there is much more things to fix (for example phpMyAdmin does not see all tables for some reason) and definitely more to test. However the question is if we want to officially support Drizzle and put some effort into it.

You can try phpMyAdmin with Drizzle here: http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/master-config/?server=3

After being noticed in blog comment about another theme for phpMyAdmin, I started to look for other hidden contributions for phpMyAdmin and I was surprised how many people did not even try to submit their code upstream. Have you ever considered trying to contact upstream?

Quick search on SourceForge.net revealed:

VisualMCD for phpMyAdmin

An Add-on for phpMyAdmin which enables user to create PDF Schema and Relation with a simple click and mouse moves. No more fastidious typing of table coords needed to create the PDF Schema.

Even though the SF.net history says it was released 440 days ago, it is actually dated back to 2003 and it obviously is not compatible with current code base. Also we have similar feature for few years now, so it was just duplicated effort.

phpMyAdmin theme: Paradice

Paradice is a Theme for the popular web-based database administration tool phpMyAdmin. You will find the development version here. All official releases will be made by the phpMyAdmin project.

This theme is just developed externally, but you can get it from our themes page

phpMyAdmin persian project

phpMyAdmin persian project

Something what seems to be dead from beginning. Anyway if you want to translate, please use our translation server.

MySQL Form Generator pour PHPMyAdmin

C'est un outil pour crr un site autour d'une base. Un gnrateur de formulaire. Sur base d'une DB Mysql.Projet prvu pour tre intgr PhpMyAdmin.mysql -> formulaire HTML+javascript avec le code PHP pour trater les soumissions de donnes.

Something we still don't have in phpMyAdmin, however the project is inactive for more than year.

pmahomme

Clean, modern and easy to use phpMyAdmin theme.

Theme which started this search, however it seems to fail for me right now.

phpMyDesigner

Plugin for phpMyAdmin. PhpMyDesigner is a tool written in PHP and Ajax. This CASE with WEB interface. ( MySQL )

This actually does not fit into this blog, because it is one of projects that got merged and are now part of our code base.

phpMySchema

phpMySchema is a tool written in PHP for generating an ERD or otherwise graphical view of your MySQL databse over the web. It is being developed to be used as a standalone script and as a module for phpMyAdmin.

Generally it looks like an interesting addition, however we can quite well compete with this after this year's GSoC, which added ability to export schema in various formats.

Once in a time when looking at my Debian Developer's Packages Overview, I just start to think there is way too much bug reports for phpMyAdmin package in Launchpad. Today the threshold was 30 :-).

Managing them is usually not that hard, because vast majority of them are just duplicates of same issue. Basically all problems come with the fact that dbconfig-common really does not behave nicely when database server is not configured and user tries to configure it. I know people should just answer no to first question, whether to use dbconfig-common, but they don't and it then horribly fails.

Today I finally decided to ignore all errors from dbconfig-common in our packaging scripts, so you will get an error, but the package will be installed. As it seems that this is what most Ubuntu users expect after all.

This also shows huge difference between Debian and Ubuntu users - such bug has never appeared in Debian bug tracker, but has zillions of duplicates in Launchpad in various incarnations (LP#618852, LP#621569 and the most favorite LP#456674).

There seems to be increasing demand for changing default theme in phpMyAdmin. Well the obvious question is which one to choose :-). There are currently 3 themes compatible with 3.3 branch, what is still far away from current master, however I don't see that they would mean big improvement over current ones.

Maybe we should just make some contest for new theme?

Anyway if we decided to change the theme, we will still get complains from users that we did the change. At least this is what I remember from last attempt to do so several years ago :-).

The phpMyAdmin's feature tracker is kind of special thing, which grows all the time. From time to time I try to go through all of them and properly mark those who are fixed meanwhile or do not make sense anymore.

Today I started with 277 (49 of them already marked as fixed in upcoming releases). After random accessing the list and about one hour I'm down to 266 (53 out of them fixed in git). Well 15 less is not that much better, but at least I managed to kill some long waiting zombies, which turned out to be bugs instead of feature requests.

I finally made some progress on Czech translation of phpMyAdmin and it has again reached 100%. It was first time since merging GSoC projects, which introduced quite a lot of new strings. Not that they would be hard to translate, but it was rather hard to find time for that.

However there are still lot of translations which are quite behind and would need some love. So if you can translate, you're welcome to join our translators and translate!

PS: If you're looking for more work, we're also translating documentation :-).

GSoC 2010 is over for some time and I should write some summary how students projects ended up. The very short summary is that all five students were successful and their work got merged. Follows description of the project in no particular order.

Thanks to Martynas Mickevicius you can now get charts out of various parts of phpMyAdmin. They are used on server status pages or you can get query results in form of several charts. It seems to work pretty well at least what I've tried so far.

Ankit Gupta was working on Visual Query Builder for phpMyAdmin. Unfortunately this is only project which is not yet merged to master branch, mostly because some UI things were not yet finished. But hopefully it will be merged soon.

Adnan Mughal was converting our schema export feature from PDF to support multiple formats. You can now get the schema as SVG, DIA or even Visio formats, some of them will require a little bit of tuning still, because the scaling is not perfect.

Ninad Pundalik did a lot of work on AJAXifying phpMyAdmin. His changes touched quite a lot of places and there are still some rough edges (as you can see in our bug tracker), but this is definitely welcome improvement and I hope it will get stable soon.

Piotr Przybylski basically continued in his effort two years ago when he had reimplemented setup script and now he had focused on user configuration. It can be stored in session, browser local storage (HTML 5 feature) or in separate table in phpMyAdmin configuration storage (that's new name for pmadb). This is something what people were requesting for very long time and I'm happy we can finally bring this feature.

And last but not least is Lorikeet Lee, who spend lot of time on tuning user interface of phpMyAdmin. The most visible changes are on export and import pages, which now should be less scaring for new users, but there are other changes in lot of other places, for example the main page.

Generally it was a great summer and I hope we will be so successful also next year.

PS: You can try all these features on http://demo.phpmyadmin.net/.

Quite recently (just when migrating to gettext), it is possible to translate phpMyAdmin using web interface, which is powered by great software called Pootle. Thanks to this new interface, we've attracted quite a lot of translators and lot of languages are now much improved. Yesterday I also implemented way to backport these translations to old PHP based translation system which is still being used in 3.3 branch, so that even upcoming releases from this branch will benefit from this translation boost.

Yet another great think which happened thanks to l10n.cihar.com, is availability of German version of Wammu website, where enormous amount of work has happened in last few days.

Kudos to all people who are working there.

We've yesterday announced students accepted this year to Google Summer of Code. The number of our projects is increasing every year and the number of applications grows even more. So it was hard to choose this year knowing that we can mentor only limited amount of students (we would happily do two or three more projects, but we simply lack manpower to mentor them).

So the students are chosen and I hope they will produce good results and all phpMyAdmin users will benefit from their contributions. If you want to follow the projects more closely, Planet phpMyAdmin is the right place, first student blog posts are already appearing there.