gqshen.com

Last weekend I spent one night to upgrade this blog from WordPress 1.5.1.3 to 2.2.1. Basically everything goes smoothly except the database character sets issue because there are some Chinese characters in my posts. I searched the web and tried many times and finally it works, though I still don’t know the details because I am really not good at MySQL things. What I did is:

1. Run SQL query

   show variables like '%character%';

   to check the character sets of the database. If the character_set_database is latin1, change it to utf8 by

   alter database mydb character set utf8;

   where mydb is the name of the database.

2. Edit wp-config.php, change the line

   define('DB_CHARSET', 'utf8');

   to

   define('DB_CHARSET', '');

These two steps basically solve the Chinese display problem. (References: 1, 2 and 3)

The new version of WordPress is very good, especially the support of widgets and many other improvements from version 1.5.x. I also changed the theme to GlossyBlue 1.4 and modified a little.