GSoC project ideas for phpPgAdmin

GSoC season started!

PostgreSQL has been accepted this year again as project organization. Big thanks to Selena and others to handle this for the community! You can find the PostgreSQL GSoC 2011 page here. As far as I know, student projects submissions starts today.

phpPgAdmin is a sub-project of the PostgreSQL organization and already had 3 or 4 projects accepted in past GSoC programs.

I was mentoring for the first time one project for phpPgAdmin last year and enjoyed it. Leonardo Augusto Sápiras was the student that worked on this project and did a good job. He was working hard, learning how to use community’s tools, how to communicate with us, discussing issues, code and managed to finish his project in time. All his work was committed during or soon after the end of the GSoC…everything while still being at school as a Brazilian student!

Good news is that he’s motivated this year again and is currently writing a proposal to add a long time wanted feature: a proper plugin architecture. It might be a good subject for another blog post later. Hopefully his proposal will be accepted.

So, here are some more ideas for PPA:

• support PostgreSQL 9.1
• switch PPA to UTF-8 only
• graphical explain: kind of a merge between pgAdmin one and the excellent https://explain.depesz.com. But to be honest, as I told to Leonardo, I would like to keep it for me
• add support for multi-edit/delete/add data from tables
• drop adodb keeping the compatibility. A lots of advantages here: remove dependency, ability to use some postgresql-only php function, lighter low-level db access layer, last but not least: ability to keep a full history of PPA queries, downloading it etc
• support for showing/editing database/user/database+user/function specific configuration parameters
• cleanup / improve xhtml code for better themes, accessibility and add some more theme

Plus, check our TODO file for a bunch of pending TODOs or our feature request list on sf.net for more ideas!