Basically, the details go like this...Yes, yes, we know! We REALLY didn't want to make another release, but it's REALLY necessary. In fact, we need this one tested, because of some major last minute changes that could break existing sites.
If you have a site that is in another language (and therefore, another encoding), we need the upgrade process tested ASAP. If you have a site written in German, French, Swedish, Norwegian, Italian or any other ISO-8859-X encoding, we need you to copy it to another location and upgrade. After the upgrade, make sure that when you edit, the content still shows correcty.
The plan is to release this Friday, so please test it as soon as you can and we can get this release out and as bug free as possible sometime this week!
Before beta6, every language could specifiy their own encoding for their translation. Most of the European languages used ISO-8859-x encodings. English used UTF-8. However, this encoding change was a pain, because you either had to set the encoding of each template to match, or change default_encoding in config.php to match the admin language.
I've decided from here on out that all languages should be utf-8 instead. Yes, that might alienate some older browsers, but I think it's a risk worth taking.
So, now, no matter what the language in the admin, all of output will be the same encoding. This is a great thing as we move ahead, because it won't require noobies to change encodings just to get their language to work.
However, this creates a problem for existing sites. If the language encoding doesn't match the encoding in the existing content, it's not going to look right when you edit a page (or the template, or News, etc).
So, for certain situations, we're going to have to force the admin to display in the old encoding so that it matches. So, I've added an admin_encoding parameter to config.php and doing my best job to change it according to various existing settings. However, there could be a situation where it could need to be adjusted.
What does admin_encoding do? If the language translation is in utf-8 and the admin is displaying iso-8859-15, then the admin translation will look wrong. Good question. However, the beauty is this... I've found code to modify the encoding of languages on the fly. So, even though the strings are in utf-8, they're being converted to whatever is in admin_encoding automatically to match the content in the database.
It's a win-win situation. Existing stuff still works. New sites will be more language and noob friendly.
What would be the ultimate solution is to convert existing content to utf-8, but because of modules and other stuff, I didn't want to go there. That's an exercise left up to the reader.
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