In my opinion it si a good diea to know how to do the code and stuff manually in case you ever need to. So finish the book! phpMyAdmin, as I said is just an AID.
No your users do not have to go through phpMyAdmin to input their data.
You have to use a code within the PHP scipt to do that if you want a user to input their data.
Here I'll demonstrate:
//Along comes a user who wants to add their name to your mailing list lets say
//They have inoput their name and email via a form on another page which directs them to this PHP file...
//First lets specify some important variables
$dbhost = "localhost"; ##The MySQL host
$dbuser = "root"; ##Your MySQL username
$dbpass = ""; ##Your MySQL Password
$db = "test"; ##The database you wish to use
$table = "table1"; ##The table that will hold the users name and email
//Connect to MySQL
@mysql_connect('$dbhost', '$dbuser', '$dbpass') or die ("<b>ERROR: could not connect to MySQL server</b>");
//Select a database
@mysql_selct_db('$db') or die ("<b>ERROR: could not select Database <i>$db</i>.</b>");
//Now we add the users information to the Database
$query = "INSERT INTO $table (name, email) VALUES ('$user_name', '$user_email')";
$result = mysql_query($query) or die ("<b>ERROR: there was an error inserting the information</b>");
//finally we display a thankyou message of some sort if you wish
echo "Thankyou for adding your details to the database!";
I may have made a few parse errors but thats the idea, i dunno if that helps you understand at all that phpMyAdmin is an administrator tool not a user tool.
😃
