PMA-BetterDesigner - Readme

Fixes and improvements for the phpMyAdmin designer to enhance its usability

Overview ✨

About

The phpMyAdmin designer is a built-in tool for creating ERDs (Entity-Relationship Diagrams) for databases. However, several issues make it frustrating to use, and it lacks essential features, such as exporting saved pages. This project provides fixes and improvements to enhance its functionality, making it a more effective tool.

This project was developed and tested with phpMyAdmin 5.2.1 in the XAMPP package on Windows. Further testing on other operating systems and PMA versions is needed. Fixes and features are separated, allowing you to enable or disable them in any combination using the settings.json file. It should also work with different themes.

Installation

1. Download and extract the release zip file.
2. Navigate to the v1.x.y.min folder and copy its contents (config.header.inc.php file and BetterDesigner folder).
3. Paste the copied contents into your phpMyAdmin folder (e.g. C:\xampp\phpMyAdmin).

Features

• Fix - dragging tables
• Fix - table squeezing at canvas borders
• Fix - table buttons shifting positions on hover
• Fix - dragging tables outside canvas boundaries
• Fix - scrolling issues in the designer area
• Fix - invisible relations when dragging tables
• New feature - scrolling the designer area by dragging the mouse
• New feature - zooming the designer area using mouse wheel while holding the Alt key
• New feature - screenshot mode for saving full ERD with GoFullPage or Firefox full page screenshot
• New feature - importing and exporting designer pages
• Each feature works independently and can be disabled in the settings.json file
• Compatible with different themes

Note

Room for improvements:

• Testing compatibility with other phpMyAdmin versions
• Testing support for different operating systems
• New feature - option to make all tables the same size
• New feature - table style picker
• New feature - dragging relations with the mouse
• New feature - changing relation colors

Acknowledgements

• Flaticon - camera icon
• Flaticon - Porting icon
• Flaticon - Close icon
• Stack Overflow - How to save designer pages in phpmyadmin
• Phuoc Nguyen - Drag to scroll