TLDR; This evening I put the final blotches on to a new release of phpPgAdmin 5.6. This release adds official support for all recent Postgres versions, fixes a number of smaller bugs, and includes several language updates. While I think upstream packagers need not worry about absorbing this release, I’ve made downloads generally available from the Github project page, or you can just pull from git to get the latest code. Note this release is designed to run on PHP 5.6.

Now for the backstory…

After much hoopla a few years back about new admin clients and talk of the pgAdmin rewrite, most of the regular contributors had pretty much moved on from the project, hoping to see a clearly better admin tool surface as a replacement. Instead, I saw multiple projects launch, none of which captured the hearts and minds so to speak, and saw the number of pull requests on an ever more abandonded looking project continue to pile up, not to mention thousands of downloads.

As for me, while not doing much publically, privately I was still maintaining two private copies of the code, one which had support for newer Postgres servers, and one which had support for PHP 7; both in rough shape. While my schedule doesn’t leave much time for random hacking, about a month ago I saw an upcoming block where I would be conferencing three weeks in a row and suspected I could probably find some time during my travels to do some updates. After a little bit of thought, I decided to do two releases. The first would add support up through Postgres 11, the most recently released version of the server software, and the second would add the aforementioned PHP 7 support. Granted, it’s taken longer than I had hoped, probably mostly because that’s how software engineering works, but also because I had to literally relearn how it is we were running this project, but I think I’ve got most of that worked out now.

I suspect the two releases might annoy some people, given that PHP 5.6 is years old and in many peoples minds EOL. But it turns out that a lot of people still run various 5.x versions of PHP, so this is a nod to that user base. If you are one of the people who has been waiting for a PHP 7 release, don’t worry. As mentioned I already have a patch set, so I’m hoping to have that completed in the next couple of weeks. Once that is released, I think it will make for a good base to start adding new features again; there is a bunch of stuff that could be added into phpPgAdmin, it’s just a matter of re-igniting the engine, so to speak.

In any case, there is life again in the old project. Long live open source.