Phpmyadmin not connecting to mysql on OSX? Try switching from localhost to 127.0.0.1

Use 127.0.0.1 instead of locahost when trying to get phpmyadmin to connect to mysql on OSX Lion

Open config.inc.php and change

change $cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = ‘localhost’;

to 

$cfg['Servers'][$i]['host'] = ’127.0.0.1′;

I first found this fix posted at djangoapp.com and then a pretty solid description of why the issue exists by Rafael Luthigerover at ServerFault.

"MySQL will try to connect to the unix socket if you tell it to connect to "localhost". If you tell it to connect to 127.0.0.1 you are forcing it to connect to the network socket. So probably you have MySQL
configured to only listen to the network socket and not to the file system socket."