Recently I was setting up a website for my church (PKCMC); and decided to signup the hosting package from 3ix (www.3iX.org) which only cost RM146 for 2 years.
One of the reasons I pick 3iX was because it has this “Fantastico”, Fantastico (wikipedia) is a commercial script library that automates the installation of web applications to a website. And wordpress is one of the features that had ready.
After installing and looked simple till I realized something not right when using Chinese Character and it display “?????”; well, I don’t have this problems on other blog (creadaq.wordpress.com). Searching through google and found out there were many type of answers.
Most commons from WordPress Support, however, it doesn’t help and I keep on looking at some blog with the same file (wp-config.php) which it have this code…
define(‘DB_CHARSET’, ‘utf8′);
define(‘DB_COLLATE’, ”);
But it was working fine. So, don’t remove or replace it. It might corrupt your WP database.
Then I found out some resources about SQL database setting for WP. The main issue is that for most systems when you create a database, the collation is set at “latin1_swedish_ci” as default. You’ll need to change that to “utf8_unicode_ci” for all the tables where you plan to include Chinese characters in.
If you have cPanel, try look for mySQL Database or PhpMyAdmin
Well, first I though it was changed by just select it from the drop down. NO! There was many more to be done. Let me show the steps and screens. Please click screen to enlarge.
You’ll see something like this, might defer from yours as some plugins will add their own tables.
Anyway, on this screen, under the “collation” column, if you see latin1_swedish_ci, you’ll need to change that to utf8_unicode_ci!!! Click on the button 2nd from left on the column that says “Action”.
You’ll reach a page that says Structure as shown below, check everything that says latin1_swedish_ci, then click on the edit button which looks like a pencil.
You’ll reach another page like the one above, change everything to utf8_unicode_ci, then click Save.
Then, when you finished saving, go to the tab that says “Operations”.
Change again setting to utf8_unicode_ci, then press “Go”.
Repeat steps for all that are not “utf8_unicode_ci”. Make sure you click each of the list on the left menu.
Finally, you should be able to write in Chinese characters now. See pkcmc.org.
