Introduction and Installation - Mastering phpMyAdmin 3.1 for Effective MySQL Management - page 6

If we are using a server supporting only PHP4—for which the PHP team has
discontinued support since December 31, 2007—the latest stable version of
phpMyAdmin is not a good choice for download. I recommend using version 2.11.x,
which is the latest branch that supports PHP4.
The files offered have various extensions: .zip , .tar.bz2 , .tar.gz, .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). In the following examples, we
will assume that the chosen file was phpMyAdmin-3.1.1-all-languages.zip .
After clicking on the appropriate file, we will have to choose the nearest mirror site.
The file will start to download, and we can save it on our computer.
Installation procedure
The next step depends on the platform you are using. The following sections detail
the procedures for some common platforms. You may proceed directly to the
relevant section.
Installation on a remote server using a
Windows client
Using the File explorer, we double-click the phpMyAdmin-3.1.1-all-languages.
zip file we just downloaded on the Windows machine. A file extractor should
start, showing us all the scripts and directories inside a main phpMyAdmin-3.1.1-
all-languages directory.
Use whatever mechanism your file extractor offers to save all the files, including
subdirectories, to some location on your workstation. Here, we have chosen c:\ .
Therefore, a c:\phpMyAdmin-3.1.1-all-languages directory has been created
for extraction.
Now, it's time to transfer the entire directory structure c:\phpMyAdmin-3.1.1-all-
languages to the web server in our webspace. We use our favorite FTP software or
the web control panel for the transfer.
The exact directory under which we transfer phpMyAdmin may vary. It could be
our public_html directory or another directory where we usually transfer web
documents. For further instructions about the exact directory to be used or the best
way to transfer the directory structure, we can consult our host provider's help desk.
After the transfer is complete, these files can be removed as they are no longer
needed on our Windows client.