I manually upgraded to UTF-8 a few months ago. This was my experience and these are my notes. I hope they are helpful to you or to the vB team.
I'm not sure why everybody else does so much work to change the databse. Unlike others, I upgraded the database to UTF-8 using MySQL's native ability to change one character set (latin1) to another (UTF-8). Simple as the ALTER TABLE statement. For instance:
This requires a good understanding of MySQL and Excel.
The basic steps:
0. Back up your database. Do this on a test server first. I'm not responsible for you messing up your forums.
1. Database: Convert the database's tables and columns from latin1 to UTF-8*.
2. HTML: Convert the connection, and HTML character set to UTF-8
3. Convert old threads to UTF-8.
The zip file contains the Excel workbook and also the three PHP files that are used to convert old usernames, threads and posts to UTF-8.
Follow the steps in each of the five sheets in the Excel workbook to complete the upgrade. Do it on a test server first.
A few notes:
- *You can actually stop and rest after converting the database. Latin1 is a subset of UTF-8. Having the database in UTF8 and the HTML in latin1 (ISO-8859-1) is not a problem here since all characters in the database are in latin1. I ran my forums for a week without any reported problems.
- I was worried about performance problems after the conversion. The only problem I ran into, and it may not be related, was sorting forums with more than 500k threads. I removed the headers that allow people to sort threads by username, thread title, etc, and my forums run extremely well now.
- I am running vB 3.8.4, but these directions should work for 4.x as well.
- I use Sphinx for search. If you do not use Sphinx, you probably want to test your forum's search functionality. It will probably work, but I haven't tested it.
I hope my experience is helpful for some of you. Please report any problems that you have.
EDIT: This thread has been moved to a forum where conversation is not allowed. Please PM me with any questions or problems.
Sorry if I have offended vB.
Though this is now in a vB4 forum, it applies to 3.8 as well.
I'm not sure why everybody else does so much work to change the databse. Unlike others, I upgraded the database to UTF-8 using MySQL's native ability to change one character set (latin1) to another (UTF-8). Simple as the ALTER TABLE statement. For instance:
ALTER TABLE `forum`.holiday CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci, MODIFY COLUMN recuroption varchar(6) CHARACTER SET utf8 COLLATE utf8_unicode_ci NOT NULL;
The basic steps:
0. Back up your database. Do this on a test server first. I'm not responsible for you messing up your forums.
1. Database: Convert the database's tables and columns from latin1 to UTF-8*.
2. HTML: Convert the connection, and HTML character set to UTF-8
3. Convert old threads to UTF-8.
The zip file contains the Excel workbook and also the three PHP files that are used to convert old usernames, threads and posts to UTF-8.
Follow the steps in each of the five sheets in the Excel workbook to complete the upgrade. Do it on a test server first.
A few notes:
- *You can actually stop and rest after converting the database. Latin1 is a subset of UTF-8. Having the database in UTF8 and the HTML in latin1 (ISO-8859-1) is not a problem here since all characters in the database are in latin1. I ran my forums for a week without any reported problems.
- I was worried about performance problems after the conversion. The only problem I ran into, and it may not be related, was sorting forums with more than 500k threads. I removed the headers that allow people to sort threads by username, thread title, etc, and my forums run extremely well now.
- I am running vB 3.8.4, but these directions should work for 4.x as well.
- I use Sphinx for search. If you do not use Sphinx, you probably want to test your forum's search functionality. It will probably work, but I haven't tested it.
I hope my experience is helpful for some of you. Please report any problems that you have.
EDIT: This thread has been moved to a forum where conversation is not allowed. Please PM me with any questions or problems.
Sorry if I have offended vB.
Though this is now in a vB4 forum, it applies to 3.8 as well.
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