Ask HN: Do you use PHPMyAdmin as an alternative to your app admin?

4 points·paraschopra··6 comments

Just curious if any of you substitute PHPMyAdmin for constructing an admin interface for your MySQL based application. Is it a recommended practice NOT to use PHPMyAdmin or other database scaffolds for administrating the application?

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It really depends. There are some scenarios where it's impossible to administrate an application by fiddling with the database - for instance in cases where the application uses caching of any kind.

My revelation regarding administration interfaces came when I realized that my admin interfaces do not have to be polished, AJAX gems of perfection because they are not meant to be used by the clients. They just have to expose some amount of the application's innards to the tech staff.

its also nice to have a custom admin panel in situations where there are more complex data interactions and you want to make sure you don't ruin things in the database accidentally

I use the Webmin MySQL module quite a bit for this on our Drupal site.

I don't see why it would be recommended not to use whatever tool fits the situation. If you understand your application well enough to hit the database directly, you probably understand it well enough to not break its integrity by modifying it directly.

I have used phpminiadmin ( http://phpminiadmin.sourceforge.net ) as the app admin alternative once before. It worked out pretty well.

I generally like to use frameworks that take care of the admin interface for me so that I don't have to worry about it. Django is a good example of this.

also consider http://www.google.com/search?q=phpmyadmin+exploit

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