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Frequently asked questions about Joomla! International Edition. JIE is a modified package of Joomla! 1.0.12, the modifications that we have made to Joomla! may cause some unexpected behaviour and we hope to address some of the common issues in this document. Why should I use Joomla! International Edition?
My 3rd Party Components/Modules/Mambots are showing strange characters when I install them in JIE, can I fix this?
Components
Mambots & Modules
What issues might UTF-8 cause on my website?
Which version of MySQL do I need?Any version of Mysql that is higher than 4.0. This is because versions less than 4.0 do not support UTF-8 databases. Although JIE can (and has) run on Mysql 3.23, we don't recommend this because there is a good chance of your data fields being truncated when you don't expect it. How can I change the settings for PDF generation?The setting for pdf generation are located in the file ./includes/pdf.php in lines 22-42 /************************ Start editing here ************************/ $lang = _LANGUAGE; // Language $enc = 'UTF-8'; // Encoding $unit = 'mm'; // Unit of measurement $format = 'A4'; // Page format $orient = 'P'; // Page orientation $fnt = 'FreeSerif'; // Font name $size = 10; // Font size $mrgleft = 20; // Left margin $mrgright = 20; // Right margin $mrgtop = 40; // Top margin $mrgbottom = 30; // Bottom margin $mrghead = 20; // Header margin $mrgfoot = 20; // Footer margin $scale = 1; // Image scale factor $nohtml= 0; // Strip all html tags, text only $runmambots = 1; // If 1, then content mambots are run on the content prior to // compiling the pdf. This may produce unexpected results /************************ Stop editing here ************************/ |
Joomla! International Edition is a core modification of Joomla! 1.0.12 and provides for all of the functionality of Joomla! and much more. It is mainly geared toward users who work in languages other than English or for administrators who run multi-language sites. This does not mean however that others can't benefit from the great improvements we have made. One of the big benefits of JIE is the use of UTF-8 as the base character encoding. This is a truly international encoding standard that will allow your site to support many different languages. In addition, users can benefit from the improved PDF functionality and the ability to customize the language packs to suit your needs.
The answer to this question is usually "yes, you can fix this". And fortunately the answer is pretty straightforward. We have tested many 3rd party components on JIE and most of them work just fine, however occasionally when using a language other than English with the 3rd party components will often result in some strange characters being displayed. The problem is that many of the 3rd party language files are NOT encoded in UTF-8, thus when the browser is trying to display the characters, they often get misencoded. The way to fix this is as follows:
Unfortunately JIE is only as UTF-8 compatible as PHP can be, since it runs on PHP. PHP 3,4,5 are not fully UTF-8 compatible and most of the string functions that they use do not work well with UTF-8 strings. This probably won't cause many problems, however we have seen a couple very minor issues that involve this lack of PHP. One way around this is to use the mb_string (multi-byte) functions, but we won't get into those details here. The problems we have encountered with this are usually associated with the browser showing some weird characters.
