Mathias Verraes has shared some thoughts about legacy applications and how development should be handled as new features are added and bugs are fixed. He proposes a "heuristic" to keep in mind as you work in your legacy code: the Repair/Replace Heuristic.

Technical Debt is a great metaphor. It shares many analogous properties with financial debt: loans, accrued interest, token payments, bankruptcy… There is a key difference however. We take financial debt with another party. [...] Technical Debt has no measure like money, and no ruleset like Property law, and, more importantly, with Technical Debt there is no other party. The organisation is both the creditor and debtor. [...] In “Managed Technical Debt”, I propose a cheap, imprecise, but surprisingly effective method for mapping and measuring debt. In short, it involves posting stickies whenever progress is impeded by debt, and keep marking the stickies for every incident.

By following this method, you gather together a better overall picture that makes determining the worst debt in your application easier. He proposes using this to follow the Repair/Replace methods: repairing something if it's well architected or replacing it if it's not.

Even when you’re not trying to decide on Repair/Replace — perhaps the decision was already made by others — the process of mapping its history will teach you more about the system and and its design. And one deep insight you learn from temporal modelling.

On NewsForge, an article with a look at phpMyAdmin has been posted, a "getting started" guide for those not familiar with the software.

So many open source projects depend on MySQL that it's almost impossible for administrators and other open source enthusiasts to avoid working with at least one MySQL database. MySQL's command line interface is easy enough to use, but if you don't feel like reaching for a five-pound MySQL reference book or Googling for proper SQL syntax, phpMyAdmin is a great alternative to learning MySQL commands by heart.

They take a brief look at how it's set up, though it's not an installation tutorial, more about configuration. They guide you through some of the interface before getting to the real functionality - inserts, selects, dumping/restoring data, working with users, and checking/repairing tables when things go awry.

On NewsForge, an article with a look at phpMyAdmin has been posted, a "getting started" guide for those not familiar with the software.

So many open source projects depend on MySQL that it's almost impossible for administrators and other open source enthusiasts to avoid working with at least one MySQL database. MySQL's command line interface is easy enough to use, but if you don't feel like reaching for a five-pound MySQL reference book or Googling for proper SQL syntax, phpMyAdmin is a great alternative to learning MySQL commands by heart.

They take a brief look at how it's set up, though it's not an installation tutorial, more about configuration. They guide you through some of the interface before getting to the real functionality - inserts, selects, dumping/restoring data, working with users, and checking/repairing tables when things go awry.