I seem to be jinxed with the way phpMyAdmin “celebrates” the publication of one of my books by changing its setup process. It happened twice with Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8. I updated the instructions between the first and second printings, but was caught out by a second change. Now it’s happened with The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP. The book was published on 1 December, and on the very same day phpMyAdmin 3.1.0 was released, changing the setup procedure yet again.
I’ll create a full tutorial on the revised procedure when I get time, but you can find a summary of the main differences on the updates page for The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4.
Hi David
Can’t find a better spot to leave this message.
Thanks for the excellent tutorial on enabling PHP in Leopard. You might wish to know that the (also excellent) Finder substitute Path Finder allows you to duplicate and then rename php.ini.default. As someone who will do anything to avoid command line interfaces, I was glad to discover that.
On the strength of this site and the enthusiastic reviews on amazon.co.uk, I have just ordered Essential Guide.
cheers
Chris
For some reason I can’t see the blog postings, only the comments to them. Is this my imagination or am I doing something wrong?
Chris R, it wasn’t your imagination. I must have made a mistake when upgrading WordPress. Now that I’m back online, I have sorted it out.
Sorry to hear about your recent bad news. I have been working through chapter 7 of Blog Design Solutions. I used your instructions in chapter 2 to get my test server set up and found that the mysql.dll for php 5.26 through 5.28 is incompatible with phpMyAdmin when running MySQL 5.1.30 on WinXP with Apache 2.2. The mysql.dll that is packaged with the 5.1.30 release does not fix the problem.
I tried a few different versions of phpMyAdmin and consistently got an error telling me that mysql.dll does not support MySQL 5.1.30, and that using the configuration could cause “unpredictable results.” That proved true, so I poked around on the web and found that I was not alone. Others were using MySQL 5.051a to fix the problem. So, I used a restore point to remove all reference to version 5.1.30 and installed MySQL 5.0.51a to make my setup work. And it does!
Since you write instructions for these setups in many of your books (and I now own more than one), it may be of interest. If you have a better solution to recommend, that would be most welcome.
Many thanks!
Hunter
Thanks for your good wishes, Hunter. I don’t think there is a solution at the moment. PHP 5.2.8 doesn’t support MySQL 5.1. I believe that PHP 5.2.9 will soon undergo testing, and will probably be released in January. I presume that it will include support for MySQL 5.1, but I’m not certain.
One complicating factor is that the dynamic library PHP uses to support MySQL is changing completely. Up to now, PHP has hooked into libmysql.dll, which is not PHP-specific. In future, a PHP-dedicated library called mysqlnd will be used. I know that PHP 5.3 will use mysqlnd, but a series of other issues unrelated to MySQL has delayed the release of 5.3. It looks as though PHP 5.3 won’t be available for at least a couple of months. If the 5.2 series doesn’t support MySQL 5.1, you might need to wait until the 5.3 series finally sees light of day.
Hi David,
Thanks for the quick reply. I appreciate the information. For now, a working test server is a wonderful thing. I have plenty to do in the meantime.
Best to you,
Hunter
David,
Sorry to hear 2009 hasn’t been particularly kind to you. Hopefully the bad is over and nothing but good comes your way now.
Chris
Hi David,
Please forgive me if you’ve answered this before, but I am having a problem with phpMyAdmin 3.1.2 on a Mac. It tells me it “Cannot load mcrypt extension”. I’ve been working on this for 12 hours now and just can’t figure out what may be wrong. I have PHP 5.2.6/Apache 2.2.9/MySQL 5.0.45. Any tips?
Thank you,
Marcelo
Chris R, Thanks for the good wishes.
Marcelo,
As far as I know, you don’t *need* the mcrypt extension for phpMyAdmin 3.1.x; it’s just recommended. Unfortunately, the preinstalled version of PHP in a Mac doesn’t support mcrypt. Rather than install everything independently on a Mac, these days I just use MAMP, which installs Apache, PHP, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin as a single package.
Thank you, David. I had Xampp installed (which worked a treat), but I couldn’t make the MySQL databases connect on DWCS3. Do you reckon MAMP is better and can I install it on top of what I’ve got already? I’ll investigate…
Marcelo, if you’re on a Mac, XAMPP is not recommended. However, I would uninstall it first before switching to MAMP.
Hi Dave,
First off thanks for the great books (PHP Solutions and Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS3) they’ve been really incredible to learn with.
I’m not sure where to post my question but thought here might be best, it concerns the chapter in PHP solutions for uploads… I’ve followed your chapter and even used the supplied page (upload04.php) but when it tries to upload to my localserver I get the following error: No such file or directory in /Library/WebServer/Documents/phpsolutions/uploads/upload.php on line 6
I’ve honestly tried everything I can think of to alleviate this and thought to give your blog a shot. Perhaps someone else is having a similar issue? I’ve set up the (upload_test) folder according to your chapter’s instructions so just thought to see if you or anyone may have a suggestion. Thank you for your time – best, m
I am just beginning “Foundation PHP for Dreamweaver 8″ and see that newer versions of Apache and PHP are available for download. Should I install the most current versions, or will I get confused as I go through the exercises that were created with older versions?
It’s ridiculous that it’s so fricken complicated to get this installed. It’s the one thing holding me back from running my own installation of WordPress on my own server. Every tutorial I can find is out of date. If someone made an installer for phpmyadmin that would let me get it setup in under 2 minutes. I’d pay $50 for it on the spot. The fact that I can’t get this going has held up my personal projects for months.
Hi David,
I enabled php on mac 10.5.5 server. Now its first page is displaying using phpinfo().
Now I want to connect php with oracle database installed in same machine. I try to connect it using oci_connect () but unable to do so. it is showing error ” Fatal error: Call to undefined function oci_connect() “.
Can you suggest how to over come on this??
Thanks,
Shyam
PHP on a Mac needs to be compiled to support the options you want. Obviously, the version on your server doesn’t support the Oracle functions. You need to recompile PHP yourself with the options you want or find a Mac package that does. I don’t know if Marc Liyanage is still packaging PHP for the Mac or if his package supports Oracle, but you could check his website at http://www.entropy.ch. Sorry, I can be of more help than that.
Hello David,
I’m very pleased with your book “The Essential Guide to Dreamweaver CS4 with CSS, Ajax, and PHP”.
“I have a problem dealing with page 613. I load register_user.php into firefox, fill the fields and when I click Insert Record I get this message :
File not found
Firefox can’t find the file at /C:/vhosts/dwcs4-xampp/workfiles/ch14/.
* Check the file name for capitalization or other typing errors.
* Check to see if the file was moved, renamed or deleted.”
Nothing is written in the ‘users’ table of ‘dwcs4′ database. I’m able to write using PhpAdmin.
Have you some help to give me?
Excuse my bad English but I’m French and not really fluent in your language!
Best regards, Isabelle.
Please help me with my install of phpMyAdmin. I have followed all of your instructions and many others and have been unsuccesful. I am trying to see the program, but it has taken many days and hours and I haven’t been able to install the program. Please help–Jason Warren
There are up-to-date instructions on installing phpMyAdmin in the tutorial that I wrote for the Adobe Developer Connection. However, these days, I normally recommend installing XAMPP on Windows or MAMP on Mac OS X. Both include Apache, PHP, MySQL, and phpMyAdmin all configured and working together.