phpMyAdmin has won some awards, as can be seen in the "Awards" section of the project's homepage. First, it was awarded "Project of the Month" for December 2002, by the administrators of SourceForge. In the interview-style document that we prepared to put on the SourceForge POTM page, I wrote that I was impressed by the download rate of our product, which was three per minute at that time. (Since then, we have reached ten per minute on peak days.)
phpMyAdmin received 75 percent of the votes from the readers of both the German PHP Magazine and its international version, in the category "Best PHP Application/Tool" for 2003. This award was officially presented to two members of the team at the International PHP Conference, held at Frankfurt in November 2003. The German PHP Magazine hosted the readers' choice again in 2005 and 2006, which phpMyAdmin won both the years.
SourceForge.net hosted its "Community Choice Awards" for the first time in 2006, and phpMyAdmin won in two categories Databases and System Administration. I represented the team at LinuxWorld, Boston, in April for the Awards presentation. The project also won "Best PHP Application of the Year" at the fifth Annual OS/2 World Awards. At the end of 2006, our project won a Silver Trophy at the third "Trophées du Libre" contest; I went to France to receive the trophy.
In 2007, at the SourceForge.net "Community Choice Awards" (CCA), phpMyAdmin was nominated in the "Best Tool or Utility for Developers" category, and won the "Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins" Award.
At the beginning of 2008, MySQL AB was acquired by Sun Microsystems for an amount of $1billion. I assume this gave SourceForge.net the idea to propose a new award category: "Most Likely to Be the Next $1B Acquisition". phpMyAdmin won this award too, along with "Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins". phpMyAdmin was also a finalist for "Best Tool or Utility for Developers".
PhpMyAdmin also won the InfoWorld's "Best of open source platforms and middleware (MySQL administration)" prize for the year 2008. For the 2009 SourceForge.net CCA, phpMyAdmin was a finalist for "Best Tool or Utility for Developers" and won "Best Tool or Utility for SysAdmins", which is beginning to look like a habit. More details are available at http://sourceforge.net/blog/cca09/winners.