This is a brief tutorial on how to update your AWSOM News Announcement database table to display any language type you’d like. It’s actually pretty straight forward. It’s best if you do not have any news posts saved since changing the language type might make them display incorrectly.

First thing you need to do is go to your web server and go to your MySQL administration tool. Typically this is a program called PhpMyAdmin (which I’ll be using to demonstrate–but any program will work as long as you can access the same areas I’ll be showing).

Start by selecting your WordPress database. This is the database you input into the wp-config.php file when you originally set up WordPress. You can select from your current databases by using the drop down menu on the left side:

Once you’ve selected the correct database you need to go to the AWSOM News Announcement table that’s in the database. It is named awsomnews but has a header prefix that’s typically wp_, but could be a custom one that you added to the wp-config.php file. click it’s name in the list under your database name on the left and it should open a new page in the main area showing details of that table.

Notice that there is a column called “collation” and it lists “latin1_swedish_ci”–this is the default language type that MySQL uses unless specifically told to use a different language type (MySQL is originally a swedish product). This language type does not display Asian or other non-English lettering based languages well (and honestly has issues with regular English also). What we need to do is change this to the correct language for you.

You can do one of 2 things at this point. You can mark the checkbox next to “newstext” and click the bottom pencil icon or more simply click the pencil icon in the same row. This will open up the individual field for editing.

Now, the difficult part. In the collation drop down select the language type you’d like. Yes, there are a very large number of them and it’s not always easy to know which one to use. For regular English “utf8-bin” is good. You’ll need to look this up for your own language since I have no idea what’s good for any other specific language. Once you know which one you want make sure it’s selected in the drop down box. Then click the “save” button.

That’s basically it. Go and try it out.

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As part of my “Hidden” features of AWSOM Plugins I want to point out a usage for the AWSOM News Announcement plugin for WordPress that may be of use to Site Admins. Most people who use the AWSOM News Announcement plugin typically use it for it’s most basic function: adding a News block above your posts on the Index page of your site. This is one great usage of this plugin and the most obvious one. But you can have multiple News Posts active at the same time, so I’d like to point out another easy usage that adds power and capabilities to your site.

One of the things that you can select when adding a new news announcement is what viewer level is able to see that particular News Post, and each News Post can have different viewer levels. By default it’s set to “everyone”, but you are able to restrict the viewer to any of the regular WordPress registered user levels. So, you can make a News Post only visible to Subscribers or Administrators, or any level in between. This makes the News Post a handy way of informing other members of your site about important information that only applies to them.

Of course an obvious usage is to restrict certain things so that only registered visitors can see/use things. An example is an audio/video player for extra site content. With the “run php” setting in News Announcement turned on you can embed any player that requires javascript or php code to function. Now you have created an incentive for visitors to sign up to your site.

Conversely you can do things so that ONLY non-subscribers see certain News Posts. By selecting this as the viewer level for a post, it only gets shown to general visitors–>which makes it an excellent way of displaying ads to non-registered users while making it a “benefit” for people to sign up to your blog so that they aren’t presented with ads. Since any content can be added to a News Post and can run, almost any ad company code or system can be set to display in a News Post.

So not only do you now have a way to give your readers information, but you can present ads and reserve enhanced content and generate more reasons for visitors to interact with your blog.

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I’ve come to realize that as a piece of software grows so does it’s complexity. As a result many features can easily be overlooked, especially if they are designed to be used in only specific circumstances. So I’ll post a spotlight on certain features or capabilities of AWSOM WordPress plugins from time to time that I think people might find useful, but may have overlooked.

The first such feature is the ability in AWSOM Pixgallery to select and display a custom image for a sub gallery in the thumbnail view. Normally Pixgallery uses your sort option setting to determine what image it uses to represent sub galleries in the thumbnail view–so it will typically show either the last added image or alphabetical image as the folder image. This means that in many cases the image displayed by the folder will change over time if you add new images to the folder. This can be good to alert visitors that new images have been added to a folder. However, in some cases you may not want this to happen and would prefer to have a set image for a particular sub gallery.

With Pixgallery it’s very easy to accomplish this. All you need to do is place an image file within any sub gallery folder and call it “pxggalleryimage” with any standard image format type (gif, jpg, png–so pxggalleryimage.gif is an example), and Pixgallery will use that image for the folder. This image will NOT appear as a member of the sub gallery, so you can use an image that you don’t even want to have actually appear in the gallery itself if you want. Every sub gallery can have it’s own individual custom image file, and you can even mix and match with some being automatic and some being preset. It’s yet another way that Pixgallery speeds up your workflow but allows you flexibility when you need it.

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As many of you who’ve upgraded to the new WordPress 2.5 version have maybe noticed there is an option on the Plugins page which basically suggests that you can auto-upgrade a plugin. I would strongly suggest you do NOT use this function right now. First off, this is not a feature that is directly supported by plugin authors, it is a function that works outside of the plugin. So if something goes wrong there may be no way for any plugin author to help you fix the situation since the plugin itself did not do the action. Secondly it’s been acknowledged that this feature is really not very robust yet and may very well fail and hose your entire WordPress insall.

I would strongly suggest that you continue to download all plugins yourself and upload them to the server. In the case of AWSOM.org plugins they all upgrade themselves properly when you reactivate them, so it’s actually not really more difficult anyway.

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I’ve had a few reports come in that people using the AWSOM News Announcement plugin or Pixgallery have been having some issues displaying different language types, most notably Asian or other non-English based character sets. The fix for these issues with AWSOM plugins, or any other plugins displaying this phenomenon, is within the Wordpress database. When a database is set up in MySQL one of the things you can assign to it is the language encoding type. In addition, all of it’s fields and tables can also be assigned a language encoding type. By default MySQL utilizes Swedish as it’s encoding type (MySQL was developed in Sweden). Wordpress typically tries to set up it’s database as UTF-8. In some cases this doesn’t work right, especially if the admin has updated their version of Wordpress continually from a version previous to Wordpress 2.1.x where this wasn’t defined.

So, the fix is to go to the database directly though phpmyadmin or another database editor and change the language type for the affected Tables and fields to the language type that you need to display. For AWSOM plugins it’s pretty obvious which tables are for what plugin by their name (I make great pains to place the plugin name as the table name)

In extreme cases you can contact me to help you out, but the best bet is to do a google search for how to use phpmyadmin.

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