Posts Tagged ‘UTF-8’

Joomla 1.x.x and UTF-8

Thursday, October 25th, 2007

I just converted two Joomla 1.x.x installations to UTF-8 encoding and I will publish the steps required for a working installation. You should consider disabling access to your website while you’re working on it.

  1. Convert database. That’s only possible if you use mysql 4 or higher, as older versions don’t support unicode yet. Converting the database itself meant for me: Use phpMyAdmin to dump it. The dump was already encoded with UTF-8. If it’s not, convert it.
    Also remove the DEFAULT CHARSET for each table:

     CREATE TABLE `v1_banner` (
    ...
    ) ENGINE=MyISAM  <strong>DEFAULT CHARSET=latin1</strong> AUTO_INCREMENT=x ;

    Or replace it by:

     DEFAULT CHARSET=utf8 COLLATE=utf8_unicode_ci

    Now re-import your dump into your database.

  2. Enable UTF-8 for your database connection. Open your includes/database.php and uncomment the