DaDaBik is a “Database Interfaces Kreator”, which helps you building web-interfaces to a database easily. It has been developed by Eugenio Tacchini. Since this is a rather old, yet working, piece of software, no wonder there’s a lot of PHP4 involved :O
I did a redesign of the template in late 2009 and took some time this weekend to get it polished up a bit. What I like about DaDaBIK is that you can provide data editing functionality and are able to adjust the look to a clients CI quickly (just replace one logo and change some colours - the PSD is included).
Although the code of DaDaBIK is from another pre-PHP5-decade, I didn’t see much of a need to change the inner workings of DaDaBIK. So what I did is putting some fresh paint on it using CSS. Since there is no template-engine imlemented into DaDaBik, I had to edit core files here and there for simple markup changes. So! The only thing that makes sense is to offer one complete package here: DaDaBik itself and the new design included.
Installation:
If you’re about to use DaDaBIK for the first time, you might want to take a look at www.dadabik.org as well, since there’s a documentation online giving you more insight. Anyways, the setup is quite easy:
- Download the archive
- Extract the files, and upload the dadabik folder to your server.
- Edit the file includes/config.php and enter your DB settings according to your setup.
- Open up the URL yourdomain.com/pathtodadabik/install.php.
- DaDaBIK will now set up some internal tables and you’re done.
- DaDaBIKs default username is root and the password is letizia
Notes:
It’s important that you have created the database, you entered in the config.php file first. (for example using phpmyadmin).
If you want to, you can use a pre-made MySQL table structure with some dummy entries that I have included in the zip: just copy and paste the contents of dadabik-example-db.sql into the SQL window of the new database in phpmyadmin.
Once you’re done with the basic installation, head over to the admin.php which gives you all the admin options you need to include/remove secific tables and set human readable aliases for the tables.
The last step to perfect interfaces is to click the Interface configurator link on that admin page.
The configurator gives you all the options to customize the appearance, set default values, define which fields are mandatory, etc. etc.
Demo:
Check out the demo of DaDaBIK with the new design.
You’ll have to enter username test and password: test@ddbdemo to enter.
(please keep in mind that a lot of features are disabled in the demo, since the test-user doesn’t have admin-rights.)
Download:
DaDaBIK Revised 1.0 (1MB, tar.gz)
Subversion Repository:
There is a Subversion repository in case you want to make use of the open source idea or really want to see some old school PHP4 :O
Changelog:
2010-03-09 initial release of DaDaBIK Revised
Hallo
Sehr gelungener Post. Da hat mich Bing wie schon so oft an einen genialen Blog geschickt.
Viele Grüße aus Monheim am Rhein
Hi,
Thank you for this great post. I am running into a problem installing dadabik under Fedora10+php5+mysql5. I did exactly the same as the
way you suggested, but when I click the button “Click this button to install DaDaBik”, the browser(FireFox) didn’t response at all. URL became http://localhost/dadabik/install.php?table_name=, and there was nothing in the browser.Will you help me out? Thanks in advance!
p.s.
I can see the database demo in phpMyAdmin and those tables.
Hello!
Greetings from California! I work at a plant biology lab and we are setting up a database of our seed collection. I’m using DaDaBIK and your very nice template. I have one question I’m hoping you can help me with (I’m just an amateur with web coding). The columns on the main page all have a large right margin, could you tell me what line of code I can edit to reduce that? I’d greatly appreciate your help and will happily share screenshots of the end result with you.
@Yuxi
you will have to setup some data tables prior to installing DaDaBik.
Also, there’s a table used only by DaDaBik which actually configures which tables DaDaBik will include in its GUI.
@Ray
I recommend using a tool like the Firebug Plugin for Firefox. This will help you find the lines of CSS that are actually applied to an element, such as a table cell. I’m sure I didn’t use any margins on table cells, so that’s probably a padding, you’re looking for.