History of phpMyAdmin - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 294

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.
Distributors
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 was already busy integrating Apache,
PHP, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin.
Evolution
On August 11, 2002, version 2.3.0 was released. There had been so many new
features that the pages were becoming too long. So, this version was the "great
split version", creating subpages to group together related features, and thereby
enhancing the Database and Table views.
The team started a schedule of releasing a new minor version (2.3.1, 2.3.2 ...)
every two months. Version 2.4.0, released on February 23, 2003, included a new
server/user management facility. Then came version 2.5.0, on May 11, 2003, to mark
the new MIME-type cell transformation system.
Version 2.6.0—released on September 27, 2004—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 topic. On April 16, 2005, 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 10 th anniversary on the same occasion, along with
the respective fathers of these products—Rasmus Lerdorf and Michael "Monty"
Widenius. A few weeks before that, at the MySQL Users Conference in Santa Clara, a
presentation was titled "PHP 5 + MySQL 5 = A Perfect 10". Indeed, we were aware of
what this anniversary meant in terms of the product's maturity.