brynk
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MySQL/Unicode and Joomla - 2007/05/24 21:04
While attending the Computers In Library (CIL) conference a month ago, I had the good fortune of waking up that Monday morning to find that back home in New Jersey, my Internet server lost 3 of its 4 RAID drives. Rather than attend CIL that day, I spent my Monday and Tuesday sitting in my hotel room rebuilding and repairing my poor Server.
I managed to get the server running on the one hard drive by Tuesday morning 9 AM. This allowed me to see the very good Joomla presentation by Tao. When I got home, I ordered new drives and started building a new server with a new Linux distribution, updated apache and MySQL. The fun began when I restored the Joomla data to my Joomla 1.0.12 site! Using a MySQLdump backup, I restored the content only to find that the content was corrupted with "rn", "rn" characters as well as whole sections of data missing within content. You see ISO character (Old style) set is a one byte system, while UTF-8 uses 3 bytes.
After a few headaches, micro-brews and google searches I discovered a few things that I thought I'd share so as to warn my fellow Joomers. First of all, Joomla 1.0.x is not Unicode compliant, specifically UTF-8 character set. When upgrading from MySQL 4 to 5, you discover that MySQL 5 installs with the default settings of character set = UTF-8. You may want to upgrade to Joomla 1.5 (Unicode compliant) but if you are like me you do not want to test the waters with a Beta software as well as find out that your plugins only work with Joomla 1.0.x.
Solution? Read this post and be warned.
UTF-8 issues in Joomla 1.0.x series
It worked and I hope sharing this with you will save you the headaches I experienced.
Bob Rynkiewicz
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