Getting Started with phpMyAdmin - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.4 for Effective MySQL Management - page 4

System requirements
The up-to-date requirements for a specific phpMyAdmin version are always stated
in the accompanying Documentation.html . For phpMyAdmin 3.4, the minimum
PHP version required is PHP 5.2 with session support, the Standard PHP Library
( SPL ) and JSON support. Moreover, the web server must have access to a MySQL
server (version 5.0 or later)—either locally or on a remote machine. It is strongly
recommended that the PHP mcrypt extension be present for improved performance
in cookie-authentication mode (more on this in Chapter 2 ). In fact, on a 64-bit server,
this extension is required.
On the browser side, cookie support must be activated, irrespective of any
authentication mode we use.
Downloading the files
There are various files available in the Download section of http://www.phpmyadmin.
net . There might be more than one version offered here and it is always a good idea to
download the latest stable version. We only need to download one file, which works
regardless of the platform (browser, web server, MySQL, or PHP version). For version
3.4, there are two groups of iles— english and all-languages . If we need only the
English interface, we can download a file whose name contains english , for example,
phpMyAdmin-3.4.5-english.zip . On the other hand, if we have the need for at least
one other language, choosing all-languages would be appropriate.
If we are using a server supporting only PHP 4—for which the PHP team has
discontinued support since 31st December, 2007—the latest stable version of
phpMyAdmin is not a good choice for download. We can use version 2.11.x, which
is the latest branch that supports PHP 4, although the phpMyAdmin team has
discontinued supporting this version too.
The files offered have various extensions: .zip , .tar.bz2 , .tar.gz, .tar.xz, and
.7z . Download a file having an extension for which you have the corresponding
extractor. In the Windows world, .zip is the most universal file format, although it
is bigger than .gz or .bz2 (common in the Linux/Unix world). The .7z extension
denotes a 7-Zip file, which is a format that achieves a higher compression ratio than
the other formats offered; an extractor is available at http://www.7-zip.org . In the
following examples, we will assume that the chosen file was phpMyAdmin-3.4.5-all-
languages.zip .
After clicking on the appropriate file, the nearest mirror site is chosen by
SourceForge.net. The file will start to download, and we can save it on our computer.