On 9 Aug 2001, Dan Allen wrote:

I really think that phpMyAdmin needs more configuration variables...It is fine to go ahead and give them defaults which many people will not change, but if someone does want to tune the look, it is really difficult now. Here is a general suggestion to start out...

This sounds like a good idea, I could definetly see to have a few different look versions for some of my things.

Everytime a table is used with this code

<table border="<?php echo $cfgBorder; ?>">

It should instead be

<table border="<?php echo $cfgBorder; ?>" cellspacing="<?php echo $cfgSpacing; ?>" cellpadding="<?php echo $cfgPadding; ?>">

I would actually like more descriptive variable names here, as it could get too confusing otherwise. If we do this tho, due to the number of variables, it would be a good idea to keep them in a class just for organizational purposes. (If the idea below is not suitable for anybody, i've got an evil way of doing something similar using a single table in a database and a little tad of code I wrote with a friend, for storing data like this.

<table border="<?php echo $cfgLook.table.border; ?>" cellspacing="<?php echo $cfgLook.table.cellspacing; ?>" cellpadding="<?php echo $cfgLook.table.cellpadding; ?>">

Here are my other suggestions:

• Have a variable for font size (and since windows and unix handle font

sizes so differently there should be OS sniffing to scale the size)

• Like W3C recommends, font-sizes should be in em and not in pt

This would be quite useful, but remember to use the browser for font sizing too.

• There should be more color preferences...such as link color

backgrounds for hover and all that

And how many browsers support the hover colours? ... Most of the time it would just be a waste of extra code.

I have patches for most of this stuff, but phpMyAdmin is changing so fast I just can't get a patch made that will work with the version...obviously I need to learn CVS, but at least I can make suggestions while I am learning. Please comment on the ideas.

I'm working on something else to help newbies to CVS learn it, but it's gonna be a while coming, and it's done entirely with a few shell scripts. (EG: when you're ready to want to do something with CVS [only needed once per session] robbat2@fermi:~/cvs$ . MyAdmin [then change to the directory] robbat2@fermi:~/cvs$ cd phpMyAdmin [update from CVS] robbat2@fermi:~/cvs/phpMyAdmin$ sf up [do some editing of config.inc.php3 & ChangeLog, and check in my work] robbat2@fermi:~/cvs/phpMyAdmin$ sf ci config.inc.php3 ChangeLog