[Phpmyadmin-devel] phpMyAdmin 4.3.0-alpha1 is released

[Marc Delisle]

Welcome to phpMyAdmin 4.3. This release contains many bug fixes and 
several new features including the work done by our Google Summer of 
Code (GSoC) students, and is the first release since the hiring of a 
full-time developer. Read on for more information or skip directly to 
the download at https://sourceforge.net/projects/phpmyadmin/files or 
always read the complete list of changes by referring to the 
changelog.php or ChangeLog files, included with this release.

First, some information on our featured GSoC projects:

Smita Kumari worked on two structure tools,
1) “a feature that enables a user to maintain a central list of columns 
per database to avoid similar name for the same data element and bring 
consistency of datatype for the same data element.”

2) Automated normalization is known as "Improve table structure" within 
phpMyAdmin. It helps to bring the table structure upto Third Normal 
Form. A wizard is presented to user which asks questions about the 
elements during the various steps for normalization and a new structure 
is proposed accordingly to bring the table optionally into the 
First/Second/Third Normal form.

Edward Cheng implemented a component which provides easy access to a 
console, including bookmarking and a history viewer.

Chirayu Chiripal and Ashutosh Dhundhara both worked on many feature 
improvements. These improvements may not be glamorous but feature some 
much needed maintenance and minor improvements.

Behind the scenes, Dhananjay Nakrani has improved the error reporting 
server, an optional reporting feature allowing users to automatically 
submit error reports directly to the phpMyAdmin developers. Now, PHP 
errors can also be reported.

Additional behind the scenes work was done by Bimal Yashodha to refactor 
the code behind the Designer interface. Most of these improvements are 
transparent to users but help ease the maintenance required on this 
portion of the code.

Our second piece of exciting news is that this release includes many 
improvements thanks to our new full-time developer, Madhura Jayaratne.

"I am so excited to be working for phpMyAdmin as a contract developer 
and since I started working, my focus has mainly been on stabilizing the 
code for the upcoming version 4.3 release. This involved fixing a number 
of bugs as well as improving performance, which was due for some time.”

The biggest improvement Madhura has brought to 4.3 is increased speed 
and performance when operating with many (thousands) databases, such as 
in a shared hosting environment.

Some of the new features are:

* Smart sorting for int keys
* Confirmation message when dropping user(s)
* Confirm dialog on accidentally leaving a page
* Allow clicking an approximate row count to get a correct one
* Support for editing binary fields in hexadecimal
* MariaDB 10+ multi-master replication support
* Allow saving query charts as images
* Use aliases in SQL export for tables and columns
* Export with table/column name changes
* Dynamic process list
* Drag and Drop SQL import
* Preview SQL instead of executing it
* Run SQL query: Allow rollback for InnoDB tables
* Zeroconf PMA tables support
* Regexp replace
* Avoid session timeout when user is active
* MySQL 5.7.5 compatibility
* Avoid session timeout when user is active
* Multiple-column foreign key relation
* Charts for data in <x-axis, series,="" value=""> format
* Range Search Capability
* Improvements for the table editor (index creation)

The phpMyAdmin team