Converting Seagull Sites to Utf-8
Table of Contents
Overview
It's very easy to run your apps/sites with full utf-8 support since Seagull 0.6.3. Seagull also supports easy switching between LTR and RTL text flow (left to right and right to left).
Convert database to utf-8 and 'general' collation
There are some issues you should be aware of if your DB data was saved in a latin 1 encoding - this was default behaviour of MySQL before version 4.1. See this article for some advice on how to convert latin 1 data to utf-8.
Save language, data and template files as utf-8
Many editors use an ASCII or latin 1 encoding by default, others offer utf-8 but are very poor at displaying it correct, a case in point is ZDE, the Zend Development Environment. Find an editor which reliably saves and presents utf-8 and use it exclusively for the language, data and templates files in your project. I have found the following editors reliable:
- TextMate
- BBEdit
Select the utf-8 version of your app/site language
This sets charset encoding correctly to utf-8 in terms of html meta tags and HTTP headers
In config set fallback language to utf-8
This is Config setting available under the Translation tab, login as admin to modify.
In admin prefs, set 'interface lang' to english-utf-8
Also logged in as admin, select My Account -> Edit preferences and select a utf-8 language.
