So here goes:
Step One - enable your EPEL repo:
$ cd /tmp
$ wget http://download.fedoraproject.org/pub/epel/6/i386/epel-release-6-7.noarch.rpm
# rpm -ivh epel-release-6-5.noarch.rpm
Step Two - Install phpMyAdmin
# yum search phpmyadmin
# yum -y install phpmyadmin
Step Three - optionally edit your Apache conf
If you get Apache forbidden errors (should not be the case) you can try editing your .conf file # vi /etc/httpd/conf.d/phpMyAdmin.conf
So that it looks like this:
<Directory /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/>
Order Allow,Deny
Allow from All
</Directory>
Remember to restart Apache afterwards
Step Four - Set a mySQL root password
$ mysqladmin -u root password "hackme"
Step Five - Edit your config.inc.php file
You should be able to navigate to http://localhost/phpmyadmin/setup and use that to create your config file, but I rather copied the sample to a new file.
Your /usr/share/phpMyAdmin/config.inc.php file should include the following:
/* Authentication type */
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['auth_type'] = 'config';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['user'] = 'root';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['password'] = 'hackme';
$cfg['Servers'][$i]['AllowRoot'] = true;