[wikka-community] International support and UTF8 support

[Krzysztof Trybowski]

Hello all,
Is there a roadmap regarding UTF8 support?

I've read the articles from WikkaWiki site, regarding this topic, but
they all seem to be pretty far from describing anything coming soon.
They are outdated too.

I'd like to push this things a little further.

The article HandlingUTF8 describes things that are not clear to me. Do
we really need to do such conversions? We CAN serve pages in utf8 and
save utf8 in database. The only issue I can image would be if PHP
functions had problems with such multibyte data. Could anyone put some
light on this issue in context of modern PHP and MySQL versions?

As for old software versions (PHP <=4.x, MySQL <=4.0) I think we could
drop support for them if that would solve problems. PHP 4 is very old
and so is MySQL 4.0.

My opinion is that WikkaWiki should use utf8 as widely as possible.
The only situation when this could be problematic is with upgrading
from already existing installations which can use any charset. I
believe there should be a special upgrading-application that would
convert the data.

Right now I use WikkaWiki trunk with some modifications to support utf
(headers, mysql collation) and it seems to be working just fine! If
there are any known issues, could you point them? So that some further
testing could be done.

Those modifications that I use are very simple ones and are described
here http://wikkawiki.org/UTF8DatabaseCollation and here
http://wikkawiki.org/WikkaLocalization#hn_Using_different_charsets

So, what actually stops us from progressing in this area?

Regards, KT


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Krzysztof Trybowski
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