This summer, I was selected for the prestigious Google Summer of Code ’17 program with the phpmyadmin organization. phpMyAdmin is a free software tool written in PHP, intended to handle the administration of MySQL over the Web. phpMyAdmin supports a wide range of operations on MySQL and MariaDB. Frequently used operations (managing databases, tables, columns, relations, indexes, users, permissions, etc) can be performed via the user interface, while you still have the ability to directly execute any SQL statement.

Introduction

phpmyadmin currently has a large number of open issues (~210 at time of writing this). To maintain and improve phpmyadmin core project the numbers of issues should be lower down. This project aims to resolving the major issues and improvements to be done in phpmyadmin. I have selected a list of issues on which I will be working this summer.

Community Bonding

Before the beginning of the official program period, Google allows students one month to get familiar with the organization they will contribute to, to get familiar with the programming practices, source code, get doubts cleared etc. phpMyAdmin is a PHP project that provides wide range of operations that can be performed via the user interface. The project code is available on GitHub at this link https://github.com/phpmyadmin/phpmyadmin

Week 1–4

Improve responsive/mobile interface

As the world is going more mobile everyday, so It would be a good idea to make phpMyAdmin responsive, so it works on smartphones and tablets too instead of desktop only.

Consolidate tablesorter libraries

Currently phpmyadmin have two javascript plugins for table sorting so it’s better to replace it with simply one. I will be replacing jquery.sortableTable.js with jquery.tablesorter.js

Nice view for JSON data

It will add the feature to have an easy view of the JSON data of a column of a table. Right now it shows in only one line, without any kind of format, so we can have an option to show when you are viewing a table with JSON data or when editing a nice JSON view.

Also, If the team decides they still don’t want to pursue the responsive interface enhancement, I’m prepared to replace that part of my summer with the solving these issues.

Support for large monitors

For this one I will set the right padding to the div that contains [Edit inline], [Edit], etc options for the very large screens.

Inconsistency with submit buttons

I will show all the buttons on the right side. And its implementation part is also similar to the above task

Error popup

The problem with this is we are unable to copy/paste stuff because as soon as we click on the popup it is closed.

Add export option to drop user security definers from views

For the last one during export option I have to make a change so that the security definition should not be included in the export file.

Week 5–8

Remove inline javascript

There are several places which uses inline javascript (onclick, onsubmit and onchange). These should be removed and placed into javascript files. After removal we can get rid of ‘unsafe-inline’ for scripting in CSP.

Disable charset conversion when importing with SET NAMES

According to the communication on issue link the charset handling seems to be broken on the import

Import/Export Progress bar-1 and Import/Export Progress bar-2

It would be really nice to have a progress bar showing import and export progress in real time in terms of percentage and having some more detailed information like which step/table it is processing.

Password “No” shown for user not in user table

When a user has access to a db (or table), but is not in the user table he’s shown as not having a password. Even after successfully running the query delete from mysql.user where user = ‘test’ I was still able to login with the test account.

Week 9–12

Configuration storage — fallback to default table names when pmadb config is set

The PMA should fallback to default table names if controluser + pmadb options are set while other like ‘relation’, ‘column_info’ are NOT in config.inc.php.

Facilitate drag and drop of columns between tables

I will implement this feature by allowing user to drag and drop the existing column from the “structure page” as well as from the navigation tree table column entry, to the “New” column entry in the navigation tree columns section of the target table.

Update 1

I will work on the forked repository and submit the Pull Request as soon it is completed. I will also post the weekly update about the project on medium. This is my GSoC’17 proposal.