Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for phpMyAdmin

Check your phpMyAdmin installations

If you run some public phpMyAdmin installation, it's time to check for latest security updates. As it looks like these vulnerabilities are being widely exploited by some worm.

If you did not use phpMyAdmin setup script, or if you strictly followed documented way for generating config file, you are on safe side. However there seem to be enough people, who left writable config directory even after configuring phpMyAdmin and it allows growth of such worm.

PS: See also proof of concept for the exploit.

Busy with translating

Today I finally found some time to work on phpMyAdmin translations. First I started on localized documentation, where I improved our current score to 24% of strings (what is still far to few to generate translated document). Anybody willing to translate lot of documentation is welcome to join us (you can choose any other language if you do not know Czech).

Later I focused on user interface translations, where Czech recently was downgraded from premium class translation (almost every time at 100%) to somewhat lower quality (fight to keep over 90%). It's time to bring it back to premium quality and I hope I will help it a lot today.

PS: If you want to help with translating of phpMyAdmin into any language, just check our instructions for translators.

Translate over web or not?

Recently we opened up translation of phpMyAdmin documentation over web using Pootle tool. As you can see on summary page, it gained some attention, but not much. You are still invited to translate!

However this is not original reason for my post. The reason is that we got question, whether we want to use translatewiki.net for translating phpMyAdmin itself. Currently we use simple PHP files with strings to localize what probably won't change in near future and translatewiki.net seems to already support similar ways of localizing PHP applications.

Now the question is whether to invest effort into this direction. Web based interface definitely lowers barrier for translating, but nobody is really responsible there and you may end up with poor quality. What is better, no translation, or not perfect translation?

PS: I'd really prefer to migrate to gettext based solution for phpMyAdmin, but this seems unlikely, mostly because gettext as integrated in PHP is quite painful. Once you load translation, it is kept opened and any changes in the file lead to segfault and any replacing of the file is deleted. So the only way to make it see updated translation is to restart PHP (or Apache if you use mod_php).

Hledá se překladatel podruhé

Již je tomu nějaký ten pátek, co jsem pro tu phpMyAdmina hledal překladatele . Překlad se sice díky tomu pohnul, ale stále ještě není kompletní. Nicméně to není důvod proč dnes píši. Tím důvodem je spuštění překladu dokumentace.

Dokumentace samozřejmě obsahuje nemalé množství textu (skoro 1500 řetězců, většina jsou celé odstavce) a tak bude nejlepší, když se na to vrhne více lidí.

Pokud se do toho někomu chce, stačí zavítat na překladový server , zaregistrovat a hurá do toho. Zkušenější překladatelé asi raději sáhnou rovnou po po souborech a pošlou nám patch.

Translate phpMyAdmin documentation

I've just set up system for translating documentation using gettext, so you have another great opportunity to bring phpMyAdmin closer to non English speaking audience.

The translation is done using po4a and gettext, what makes it more standard and probably also easier than translating phpMyAdmin itself. The easiest way to start translating is to go to https://l10n.cihar.com/projects/pmadoc/, login and translate.

If you prefer more control, you can get po file (either by svn co https://phpmyadmin.svn.sourceforge.net/svnroot/phpmyadmin/trunk/localized_docs/po or by finding it online using ViewVC) and send us updates.

I added all languages which have reasonable amount of translation and/or recent activity in phpMyAdmin. If your language is missing feel free to ask me to add one, but consider first translating phpMyAdmin itself.

Community Bonding Period

Dear students, the Community Bonding Period is almost over and I have not seen much activity from most of you. Maybe you really do not have any questions about the project or existing code base, but I really doubt it (well, the code documentation is always the weak point).

The summer is not that long as you might think and you will have lot of things to do during it!

PS: phpMyAdmin's GSoC 2009 Student Guide is still valid.

Planet phpMyAdmin update

I finally found some time to work on planet phpMyAdmin. It now has same look as phpmyadmin.net website, links to feeds are more visible and the website links to it at some places.

All templates and planet configuration are now stored in our SVN repository.

Now let's hope that I will not be the only one who regularly posts there :-).