Michal Čihař - Blog Archives for phpMyAdmin

phpMyAdmin started to be hosted on SourceForge long time ago (AFAIR it was in 2001). It has served mostly good for it's purpose, but these days, it's getting like nightmare.

First, at the end of March, CVS servers crashed and since that time anonymous CVS is disabled. Well at least that does not stop developing. Last week developer CVS server crashed. It has been disabled since then and we're now waiting for new CVS infrastructure, which should be ready several months ago (at least they promised so). This stopped phpMyAdmin development and also delayed deployment of some security fixes.

Okay, problems happen, but why the hell they didn't announce this on status page until some personal intervencies happened?

And I'm a bit confused about their "priority support" which is provided for subscribers. More than two days old report and no answer? I'm probably not going to pay next year...

It looks like XSS attacks against phpMyAdmin will be there forever. There is floating another in the air (if SourceForge would have working CVS, it would be already released). Maybe it's time to make complete rewrite of phpMyAdmin codebase? But that's too long term project and nobody seems to be interested in that. Maybe some security audit would help resolving at least most painful issues, but this is again same problem. Any volunteer to do this hard work?

I finally found some time to quickly look and try to use TurboDbAdmin. It's sort of competitor to phpMyAdmin. Why I write sort of? Firstly there are still users which prefer non javascript solution, second reason is that TurboDbAdmin definitely needs some time to get matured. Right now it looks to me more like demo of their AJAX toolkit than real application. But it is getting better version to version.

However they have some ideas which we might incorporate. First think I noticed in documentation is that they have settings for broken setups of MySQL which lead to wrong displaying of data. Just put names="latin1" and it should work. Nice, but I still think that people should rather learn how to use encodings in MySQL properly.

Second usefull thing is reload link in left frame. Well they aren't able to reload it automatically, so they need it right now, but that simple link is requested by our users anyway.

I think that somebody should learn them what QA means. Testing at least some big PHP application must have revealed some bugs which were quickly fixed in next release two days later.

Yes I really enjoy closing bug reports telling that phpMyAdmin does not work with it.

Do you want to use recent themes in your phpMyAdmin from snapshot? Now you have a chance! Snapshots are now generated for all active branches and also for themes. You can grab them here.

phpMyAdmin snapshots are back up to date and I added 7zip compression format as there were several requests for it. 7zip compresses wery well, byt it also uses lots of memory, you can find more information about 7zip on 7-zip.org.

I just updated demo server to avoid gap between current development code and demo caused by long anonymous CVS outage on sourceforge.

As special bonus HEAD demo now contains all themes which are available on phpMyAdmin site, enjoy various colours of phpMyAdmin! (Please note that not all themes are up to date with current code, so something might not look perfectly.)

I just updated phpMyAdmin demo server which is hosted by me. You can now find there all relational and MIME features enabled, so enjoy full power of phpMyAdmin on pma.cihar.com.

It also runs on new server, so it should be faster and without power downs.

After many years waiting, RFE #1068007 is done. phpMyAdmin can now export to Open Document Text and Open Document Spreadsheet. Implementation is quite simple, just generate content.xml and feed it into simle functions which puts together zip file containin everything needed.

If you don't use CVS version, you'll have to wait for 2.9.0 release.

Nebojte se, nejedná se o vyjádření podpory politické straně :-). Jenom jsem se konečně dokopal k tomu přečíst si něco o OASIS Open Document formátu a naimplementovat export (prozatím spreadsheet) do phpMyAdmina.

Z toho, že je to věc kterou se chystám napsat už asi rok a půl, je vidět, že se mi do toho nijak moc nechtělo. Nějak jsem byl vždy odrazen specifikací, tedy hlavně jejím rozsahem. Nakonec jsem se jejímu čtení vyhnul a použil jenom pár stučnějších návodů. Teď jenom doufám, že to co z phpMyAdmina vypadne. jí odpovídá. OpenOffice.org to zpracují správně, ale to se mi jako test moc nelíbí. Asi by to chtělo najít nějaký OpenDocumentlint :-).