The first internal version (0.9.0) was coded by Tobias Ratschiller and bears the date 1998-09-09. He then released version 1.0.1 on 1998-10-26. The early versions were offered on Tobias's site: http://www.phpwizard.net. (This site is no longer associated with him.) Tobias wrote in the accompanying notes:

Compared to today's version (nine years after the original), the first version was somewhat limited in features but could nonetheless be used to create databases and tables, edit their structure, and enter and retrieve data. Notice in the figure that follows that the left panel was already there to list database names (not table names yet), and the right panel was the workspace to manage a database or table. This is what the interface for databases looked like in version 1.3.0:

To work on a table, you had the following screen:

I started using phpMyAdmin at version 1.2.0 (released 1998-11-29) and was immediately hooked on the idea of being able to use a web application to maintain a remote database. However, students at Collège de Sherbrooke, where I work in Québec, Canada, are French-speaking folks, so I contacted Tobias and offered to transform his source code by outsourcing all messages in a message file. He accepted the offer and I created the English and the French message files. Then, on 1998-12-27, Tobias released version 1.3.1, the first multi-language version. (Meanwhile, he had managed to create the German message file.)

In 1999 and the first half of 2000, Tobias improved the navigation system, added features, and merged more language files. His project site maintained a discussion forum, so new ideas came along and patches were discussed. Version 2.1.0 was released on 2000-08-06, which was the last version released by Tobias, who had no more time to devote to this project.

However, users were already numerous and asked more of the product. Patches were floating on the Internet, with no way of coordinating them. A security alert (and fix) had been published by a third party, but no new version was being released. On 2001-03-31, Olivier Müller registered the phpMyAdmin project on SourceForge.net, and released a 2.2.0pre1 version. At this time, this was called the unofficial version. This restart of the project attracted some developers, who now had the SourceForge infrastructure (CVS server, forums, bug trackers, mailing lists) to help speed up the development. I personally "re-joined" the project in May 2001 and started fixing and improving the code, as my co-developers were doing.

We became "official" on 2001-05-28, as Tobias accepted our version as the new official one. I remember those months of very intense development effort, with daily improvements and bug fixes, along with new documentation sections. This effort culminated on 2001-08-31 with the release of version 2.2.0.

Here's an excerpt from the announcement file for 2.2.0:

This version had security fixes, seven new languages (with dynamic language-detection), and the code had been reworked to be CSS2 and XHTML 1.0 compliant, and follow the PEAR coding guidelines. The bookmarks feature appeared in this version—this came from a separate add-on called "phpMyBookmark".

During the following year, the development continued with the release of seven minor versions. The last version of the 2.2.x series is 2.2.7-pl1, which is also the last to have been fully tested under PHP 3. A date to note: 2002-04-03; we registered phpmyadmin.net as the official domain name for the project.

On 2002-08-11, version 2.3.0 was released. There had been so many new features that the pages were getting vertically too big, so this version was the "great split version", displaying sub-pages for each table and database group of features.

The team started a new schedule of releasing a new minor version (2.3.1, 2.3.2 ...) every two months. On 2003-02-23, version 2.4.0 included a new server/user management facility. Then on 2003-05-11, version number jumped to 2.5.0 to mark the new MIME-type cell transformation system.

Version 2.6.0—released on 2004-09-27—added support for the new mysqli extension available in PHP 5 for better performance and improved security. The interface for this version has been redesigned, including new icons and a theme manager. All these features are explained in this book. On 2005-04-16, version 2.6.2 was born, adding basic support for MySQL's VIEWs.

In June 2005, the first meeting of phpMyAdmin's development team took place in Karlsruhe, Germany during LinuxTag 2005. Six members of the team from Switzerland, Germany, Czech Republic, and Canada were present, displaying phpMyAdmin and discussing its features with the event's attendees. We also celebrated PHP's and MySQL's tenth anniversary on the same occasion.

On 2005-12-04, version 2.7.0 was released. With this version, we ended support for older configuration files—those before phpMyAdmin 2.3.0. Also, in 2.7.0 a new plug-in-based import module made its debut.

Version 2.8.0 was made available on 2006-03-06. It included a new web-based setup mechanism. With 2.8.0 the team started a new numbering scheme for version releases. The 2.8 family contains only fixes for the features already present in 2.8.0. Thus, after 2.8.0, here are some examples of the versions that can be released:

Version 2.9.0, released on 2006-09-20, added many small improvements like a font size selector, new export formats, and the possibility of using an external authentication method. On 2007-02-27, version 2.10.0's main attraction was the Designer, a new graphical Ajax-based relation manager. Version 2.11.0, released on 2007-08-21, offered support for creating views and for managing procedures, functions, and triggers.

In 2007, phpMyAdmin continues to be popular; the cumulative downloads since April 2001 have reached an impressive count of more than 14 million in September 2007 at the time of press.