WordPress 2.9.1, beware of encoding issues
I’ve just spent an hour and a half upgrading to WordPress 2.9.1. Why did it take that long? Well, their database upgrade assigned the wrong collation to the fields in the database, rendering all the double-byte characters in my posts as ???. Very annoying and a pretty major oversite for such a widely adopted piece of software.
After searching around the WordPress Forums, I found this post which blames the Gengo plugin for these encoding problems: [Plugin: Gengo] characters showing as ?????.
What was the solution? Open up phpMyAdmin. and:
1. Change the collation for each table to “utf8_general_ci”
2. Change the collation of the offending fields to “utf8_general_ci”
It’s a pain, but it’ll solve the issue. Hopefully, the next WordPress version will solve this problem.
Categorised as: Web development
Hey. I tried that for my blog, which was updated to WP 2.9.1 and all the Hebrew characters went wonky. Is it possible it’s another version of utf8 I want? Or something different?
Any help appreciated.
Hi Elie,
I’m not sure I can help here, I barely know anything about DB collation / encoding, but it might have something do with the encoding you’re serving your pages under.
Check 2 things:
:1. The encoding of your php files – are they saved as UTF-8 without the byte-order mark (BOM)?
2. The meta tag in your HTML
Hope that helps.
Mike
Well, I just checked your site, it looks like it’s serving as UTF-8. Perhaps the characters were corrupted during your last upgrade? Do you have a backup of the database before you upgraded it?
I do have a back up… What can I do?
no worries, a friend of mine helped me out. thanks.
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