WordPress Wednesday - WordPress 2.2 Upgrade Issue

Have you upgraded to WordPress 2.2 yet? . . . . . Have you re-read your older posts for flaws? Following my upgrade, I found what I like to call, garblygook. Any “special” characters in the post was converted to something that becomes unreadable. I found that WordPress did this to frustrate bloggers around the world. We’ve had it too easy for far too long and WordPress has decided to knock us down a step or two.

Lucky for you, I’ve found a way to resolve the issue. But why did it happen? In the simplest terms, WordPress changed the charset in it’s default config file while not changing the charset of your database. Think of it this way. . . Your blog is reading from your database in U.S. English while your database is storing it in U.K. English. (U.S. English: OK, I have had enough, I am going to the bar. . . U.K. English: Eeeh man, ahm gannin te the booza.)

To fix the problem, edit your “wp-config.php” file for your WordPress blog. Find the line that reads: “define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);” and comment it out by preceding it with //. The line will now look like:

//define(’DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);

This is the easy way to fix it, but it comes with a warning. The next time you upgrade you WordPress installation, you may have to do it again. SO DON’T FORGET!

The more complex, yet more permanent solution, is to convert your database character set. This solution is much more involved and not for the week of heart. If you want to attempt this and need someplace to start, let me know and I’ll be glad to help you out.

Posted on July 25, 2007

By Jason Spence