phpMyAdmin is a free software tool written in PHP intended to handle the
administration of MySQL over the World Wide Web. phpMyAdmin supports a
wide range of operations with MySQL. The most frequently used operations
are supported by the user interface (managing databases, tables, fields,
relations, indexes, users, permissions, etc), while you still have the
ability to directly execute any SQL statement.

It is recommended to use libmcrypt and mcrypt packages with phpmyadmin to
speed up database access considerably.

By default, there is only a sample config file included with the package.
You can either copy that file and edit it according to your taste or you
can do a graphical setup.  Both processes are detailed in the docs.

You can override DOCROOT, PHPUSER, and PHPGROUP at build time.
They default to DOCROOT=/var/www/htdocs, PHPUSER=root, PHPGROUP=apache.

ADDITIONAL NOTE:
You may also have to recompile PHP to include support for mcrypt.  Without this
you may see warnings about mcrypt extension in phpmyadmin.  Please see the 
link below on recompiling PHP with mcrypt support. (info and link provided by 
Joel Adamson):  http://slackwiki.org/Recompile_php_with_mcrypt