[Phpmyadmin-devel] Introducing myself for GSoC

[Silvan Troxler]

Hi everyone

I'm highly interested in the GSoC project "User interface cleanup".

A little bit about me: My name is Silvan Troxler. I'm studying
computer science at the university of Zurich (Switzerland) and working
as a freelance web developer in my spare time. I also worked for an
internet agency for 18 months before I started studying. My task there
was to build websites and test them in different browsers. In general
I'm experienced in (X)HTML, CSS, JavaScript, AJAX, SQL and PHP (even
some other things). Plus I'm a long time phpMyAdmin user (at least
five years) and a long time phpMyAdmin theme hater ;-) I'm more a
programmer than an excellent designer. But I have an eye for
aesthetics and appreciate sleek, minimal and self-explaining designs
(as phpMyAdmin should have one). I also would love to express myself
in such a well-known project as phpMyAdmin and learn even more about
graphics, usability and accessability. I started working with web
sites back in 2002.

Back to the project: I plan to implement a template engine into
phpMyAdmin as a starting point. This will simiplify the further
development of the GUI and make it much easier to work with AJAX. For
example with the template engine Smarty I made good experience and use
it almost everytime. Especially as of version 3 Smarty is very easy to
use and implement. Do you have other proposals for another template
engine as well? As a further point I would love to get rid of the
frames in PMA. With a template engine, this would be not that hard.
And of course the UI will be cleaned up but I don't yet have any
mockups.

If you are interested in my coding style you may have a look at a
project I was developing the last six weeks for an university project.
It is some kind of bug tracking system which can be integrated in
existing websites and collects all PHP errors which occur. With this
you can for example collect all E_STRICT errors which where hidden on
the web server. It also features a overview page for all errors which
occurred with an easy search interface (similar to the one of trac).
Consider this application as a veeeery alpha one which needs much of
cleaning before beeing usable. This project uses JQuery and Smarty.
http://silvantroxler.ch/gsoc/mdudu-0.0.1a.zip (about 360KB)

Thanks for your replies and your work on PMA

Cheers
Silvan Troxler

ps: I have to do some kind of internship for the university and GSoC
counts as one, so it would be great if I could be a part of this years
extending/improving of PMA :)