However, the user base had already multiplied, and they were asking for 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. Finally, on March 31, 2001, Olivier Müller registered the phpMyAdmin project on SourceForge.net, and released a 2.2.0 pre-launch version. 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, and 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 also doing.
We became official on May 28, 2001, 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 August 31, 2001, with the release of version 2.2.0.
Here's an excerpt from the announcement file for 2.2.0:
After five months, five beta releases, and four release candidate versions, the phpMyAdmin developers are pleased to announce the availability of phpMyAdmin 2.2.0. [...] on March 31, 2001. Olivier Müller (Switzerland), supported by Marc Delisle (Québec), Loïc Chapeaux (France), and a team of eight other developers re-started the phpMyAdmin project on SourceForge.net, with the authorization of the original package maintainer. Now, after five months of patches, bug fixes, new features, and testing, the version 2.2.0 is finally ready.
This version had security fixes and seven new languages (with dynamic language detection). The code had been reworked to be CSS2 and XHTML 1.0 compliant, and to follow the PEAR coding guidelines. The bookmarks feature appeared in this version, and 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. We registered phpmyadmin.net as the official domain name for the project on April 03, 2002 the date is worth being noted.
The list of distributors for phpMyAdmin would be too long and complex to gather, but here are a few pointers. First, the Downloads page of MySQL's website had a "contrib" section in which phpMyAdmin was mentioned very early after its birth. Also, many, if not all, Linux distributors included phpMyAdmin in their kit. Finally, a number of package builders prepare kits for various platforms. I'll just mention the renowned XAMPP kit from Apache Friends, available at http://www.xampp.org. Back in mid-2002, the Apache Friends group (led by Kai Seidler) was already busy integrating Apache, PHP, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin.