Mood Ring - PHP

You might not know this, but you can do a lot more with phpMyAdmin than just create tables and insert records. This first in a two-part series takes a look at some of the other features hidden under the hood of this popular PHP application, explaining how it can be used to secure access to the MySQL server, manage multiple servers, manipulate user privileges, view reports on server activity, and export MySQL data into different formats.

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By: Harish Kamath, (c) Melonfire

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October 27, 2003

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Finally, on a lighter note - are you tired of the grey-and-blue colour scheme that phpMyAdmin ships with by default? Well, you can change it to match your mood, simply by editing the appropriate parameters in (you guessed it) the phpMyAdmin configuration file.

A quick glance at the list of options available, and you'll see that just about the entire interface can be customized. In fact, this is just the opportunity for budding artists (like me) to make their lives a little more colourful...

$cfg['LeftBgColor'] = '#FF6600'; // background color for the left frame $cfg['RightBgColor'] = '#00FF33'; // background color for the right frame $cfg['RightBgImage'] = ''; // path to a background image for theright frame $cfg['LeftPointerColor'] = '#334455'; // color of the pointer in left frame $cfg['Border'] = 0; // border width on tables $cfg['ThBgcolor'] = '#657833'; // table header row colour $cfg['BgcolorOne'] = '#FFFF00'; // table data row colour $cfg['BgcolorTwo'] = '#FFCC99'; // table data row colour, alternate $cfg['BrowsePointerColor'] = '#45AA23'; // color of the pointer in browsemode $cfg['BrowseMarkerColor'] = '#FF33FF'; // color of the marker (visuallymarks row)
Here's the result.

And on that rather garish note, I'll say goodbye for now. Make sure you come back for the concluding part of this article, in which I'll be discussing some of the more advanced features available in phpMyAdmin. These include transformations, which allow you to convert ordinary fields into more powerful entities; database dictionaries, which let you store information about tables and their columns and relationships in PDF format for your database; and bookmarks, which let you save important or frequently-used queries for future use.

Note: All examples in this article have been tested on MySQL 4.0.14. Examples are illustrative only, and are not meant for a production environment. Developer Shed and Melonfire provide no warranties or support for the source code described in this article.