In an era when everything on the internet is shrinking in terms of life expectancy, be it smartphone operating systems or browser versions, phpMyAdmin, the extremely popular and often taken for granted tool for administering MySQL and other related databases from a web browser, this week has turned 15 years of old!
phpMyAdmin started as a humble project with modest aspirations. Inspired by Peter Kuppelwieser’s MySQL-Webadmin, Tobias Ratschiller began work on phpMyAdmin in 1998, but later abandoned the already popular project in 2000 due to lack of time. It was eventually Olivier Müller, Marc Delisle and Loïc Chapeaux that in 2001 eventually registered phpMyAdmin at SourceForge, and development has never looked back.
Today, with over 200,000 direct downloads per month, it has evolved into a gigantic concept in its own right — the number of lines of code has risen from 13,496 to 508,761, made possible by over 650 contributors from across the globe, translated into 72 languages, and the total cost of it all coming in at the relatively cheap total of $7,485,316.
Happy Birthday phpMyAdmin. All the best for the next 15!