forgetso

In order to get phpMyAdmin up and running on your Joomla site you need to do the following:

• Download phpMyAdmin
• Upload the phpMyAdmin-3.3.x-english.zip file to your site's main directory via FTP and unzip it there. If your server does not allow this then simply unzip it on your computer and then upload the folder instead. Once it's uploaded, change the name of the folder to "phpMyAdmin".
• In the phpMyAdmin folder create a file called config.inc.php. There is already a config.sample.php included that should help you with the next part.
  
  
• Enter the following in the config.inc.php file and save it.
  

  <?php
  // use here a value of your choice (maximum 46 characters):
  $cfg['blowfish_secret'] = 'ANY RANDOM STRING HERE';
  
  $i = 0;
  $i++;
  
  // 'cookie' (or 'http' , especially if mcrypt could not be loaded,
  // but cookie giving more meaningful error messages in the testing phase)
  // older PHP versions had some problems with "cookie" on 64 bit boxes though
  $cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'cookie';
  
  // PHP 5 support for new MySQL 4.1.3+ features:
  $cfg['Servers'][$i]['extension'] = 'mysqli';
  
  // if you insist on "root" having no password, pma3 needs:
  //$cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowNoPasswordRoot'] = true;
  ?>

  Remember to add a blowfish_secret of your choice. This can be any random string, up to 46 characters in length.
• Now go to http://YOURSITE.com/phpMyAdmin.  You will see the login screen for phpMyAdmin.  Enter the username and password for your database, which you can obtain from your configuration.php file in your main Joomla directory.
  
  
  
  So in the configuration file you're looking for code like this:

  $user=USERNAME;
  $password=PASSWORD;

  And you would then use these details here:
  
  
• Finally, you will want to restrict access to http://YOURSITE.com/phpMyAdmin using htaccess. To do this, create two files called .htaccess and .htpsswd in the phpMyAdmin directory.  Go here to generate the content for these files.

Alternatives

There are other ways you could use phpMyAdmin. Your server may have CPanel or something similar installed on it, which usually means you can access phpMyAdmin from there.  There is also JoomMyAdmin, which allows you to run phpMyAdmin as a component in the administrative section of your site.  However, I find that both of these methods are restrictive because they open phpMyAdmin inside frames.  This reduces the size of the interface quite drastically and leads to a diminished user experience.