Database management by single PHP file

Yesterday I found myself in situation when I had to look for something else regarding MySQL database administration. Google search led me to something surprising. It is named "Adminer" and it exists in one single PHP file.

On it's web page, it has a detailed comparison with similar, well known tool, PhpMyAdmin which I had been using for years.

http://www.adminer.org/en/phpmyadmin/

I decided to give it a try and downloaded version "for Mysql".

Since there were no installation instructions, I just put it in my local htdocs directory. Then entered in browser address bar: localhost/adminer-3.2.2-mysql.php

And voila, login prompt.

After entering your credentials, it is straightforward to use if you have previous experience with similar tools.

I am not a power user of PhpMyAdmin, however, I see that Adminer has all features like the former tool.

Look and feel is simplistic. But you can choose some of available skins. Download css file and copy it in the same directory where you put adminer-x.x.x.php.

Do you know of something similar? Share your experience.

Recover lost page in Drupal

Did you ever lost a page, in Drupal CMS, without having a backup copy?

It happened to us yesterday.

While working on repeating and rather boring task of pasting a chunk of the same code in many existing pages, my co-worker made a mistake and deleted content of a very important page.

It took us some time to realize what exactly the problem was. Since it was the front page, we thought that the site was not working at all.

The only backup, unfortunately was some 20 days old.

I tried to find some solution googleing about it. First few results clearly explained that Drupal, by itself, does not have some kind of recycle bin. Even the worst fact was that the page was not deleted at all, just completely overrun by the wrong piece of replacement code :-/

Thanks to this post: http://drupal.org/node/392326 we found the solution.

If your page has been online for some time, you can find it by google search, searching by it's url (to get it on top of results). The result has one link labeled "cached" and if you are lucky, cached page will be your exact version that got "lost".

Invisible trouble

Perhaps you never encountered this. Happened to me once before and today I managed to fix it.
We use CodeIgniter PHP Framework as main tool in our work on this particular project. Me and my co-workers are developing rather huge website.

I am not going to write it's url here, because it is not fully online yet and I would be embarrassed to let you see all it's flaws ;-)  

The main page (home), on it's top, started to display some error messages like "Headers already sent ... blah, blah" and mentioned Session.php library.

I know that it like happens if one would print or echo something in the same method containing the PHP header() function later.

But there was not supposed to be any header() statements on that page/method.

I googled up some tips about it. The most significant advice was that there are some space characters outside of opening or closing PHP tags in a controller.

Notepad++ did not show any spaces there. Nor did the regular Notepad show anything.

This is a kind of thing that makes my self esteem disappear, in seconds :-/ Don't know when or if I am going to fix it or when.

Then I remembered to try again but using GVim. I was not surprised to see some one or two strange characters on the beginning of controller file, because it was the only logical cause for this error.

It also proved to me that I should use GVim as a main editor.

Why this happened? I suppose that is because different text editors open, save and close files in a non consistent manner, or do it in a different way.