One of the appealing aspects of this tool is that it circumvents the firewall hassles of GUI client MySQL tools like MySQLCC (control center) and MacSQL. Instead of connecting from across the Internet, the various scripts of the PHP MyAdmin package connect from www.it.scps.edu to www.it.scps.edu. In fact, that domain name is circumvented entirely by the name 'localhost' which is what the scripts actually connect to. Consequently, the firewall doesn't come into play -- the connections from within the system itself to applications running on the same machine are not viewed as security threats.
Consequently, you can download, unpack and configure PHP MyAdmin without much trouble. It's not even necessary to have permission to create databases. In our situation with www.it.scps.nyu.edu, we are all using the php database. That's fine. The create database functions are simply grayed-out in the main menu of operations.
MySQLAdmin is not unlike a GUI MySQL client, although it is a little clumsier graphically, since it's implemented in HTML. There are some features that are actually better, though. For example, it is easy to convert queries into "php code" -- little fragments of MySQL-related PHP code that you can implement in your own scripts.
In order to set up the package on www.it.scps.nyu.edu, do the following: