CMS Made Simple Forums

I have trouble with the charater sets.

I am using data from an "external" database that are displayed in CMS. It is in fact just other tables in the same database as CMS ms.

The trouble is that the data from the external database are, for some reason, displayed with ISO-8859-1 Latin 1 encoding, while everything in CMS ms is encoded in utf8.

If I set a template to ISO-8859-1, the "external" data are displayed correctly - with the 'æ,ø and å, as w use in Norwegian. But the CMS ms pages are not displayed as they should. These characters is displayed as something very different.

If I use a template set to utf8, the CMS ms data is dispayed correct, but not the data from the external database.

To me it is obvious that I either have to find a way to display the data from my extrnal database as utf8 (it is retrieved through user defined tags in CMS ms), or I have to find a way to use ISO-8859-1 for the CMS ms pages.

So far I have found that it is not enough to change the template to ISO-8859-1. Also new pages made with this template is displayed as if the characters are interpreted as utf8 characters.

Does anyone have any suggestions on what to do?

i have the same question as you, word for word.. . i you have find the solution, well you know.  : ]

i found a little setting that might help:

in config.php you can put what you need there. ..    i might mess up other things. 
as my problem is very minor, only with the apostrophe, all i need to do is edit the DB and put "new" apostrophes and voilà. 

I've just fixed a similar problem.  The British pound symbol "£" was turned into "??" in page content, titles, menus etc. ( Maybe we should just use the Euro  ) The problem was the character set used in the database.  Changing the character set from ascii to latin1 fixed the problem.