This appendix proposes guidelines for solving some common problems, and provides hints on how to avoid them. It also explains how to interact with the development team for support, bug reports, and contributions.
A section at the beginning of the Documentation.html file (which is included with phpMyAdmin's software), discusses system requirements for the particular phpMyAdmin version we are using. It's crucial that these requirements be met, and that the environment be properly configured, so that problems are avoided.
Some problems, such as phpMyAdmin bugs, are in fact caused by the server environment. Sometimes, the web server is not configured to interpret .php files correctly, or the PHP component inside the web server does not run with the mysql or mysqli extensions. MySQL accounts may be badly configured. This can happen on home servers as well as on hosted servers.
When we suspect that something is wrong, we can try a simple PHP script, test.php, which contains the following, to check if the PHP component answers correctly:
<?php echo 'hello'; ?>
We should see the hello message. If this works, we can try another script:
<?php phpinfo(); ?>
This script displays information about the PHP component, including the available extensions. We should at least see a section about MySQL (proving that the mysql or mysqli extension is available), which provides information about the MySQL Client API version.
We can also try other PHP scripts that make a connection to MySQL, to see if the problem is more general than just phpMyAdmin not working. As a general rule, we should be running the latest stable versions of every component.