Display phpmyadmin export templates
phpMyAdmin can use a special database, called the phpMyAdmin Configuration Storage, to enable a whole range of advanced features, including the export templates. Along with this, there is usually an additional user, the controluser, added to give phpMyAdmin permissions to work with the database in a shared environment. While phpMyAdmin makes efforts to work around any of these through a zero-configuration feature, it's suggested that to use these features, the database and tables must exist, and the controluser and table names must be set in the configuration file, config.inc.php.
Since you are using the Debian packaged version, the installer should have attempted to create (or migrate) all of this for you automatically. Perhaps there was an authentication problem or some other error during installation. You should try to run the post-install script again with dpkg-reconfigure -plow phpmyadmin.
For a user who has installed their own phpMyAdmin outside the package manager, I would suggest following the installation steps from the documentation; create the control user, import the sql/create_tables.sql, and add the configuration directives to config.inc.php. But in this case, the package manager should do all of that for you and attempting to manage things by hand could cause difficulty.