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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I wanted to let everyone know that older versions of AWSOM Pixgallery will not work entirely correctly in WordPress 2.6 based on the changes that have happened in the way certain paths are determined in WordPress. The basic features of Pixgallery should work fine, but certain other features, most notably the automatic default gallery creation during plugin install, the automatic cache folder creation during plugin install, and the “clear the cache folder” function in the Pixgallery Captions admin menu may not work correctly.

The current projected date for release of WordPress 2.6 is July 14 2008, and i expect to have a new version of the Plugin available by that date that fixes these issues, but I just wanted to caution any early adopters to make sure that you know that there could be some issues.

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Hi everyone, if you haven’t been visiting Harknell.com recently you might not be aware that I’ve been working on a fix for a weird Fancy Permalink issue that causes “index.php” to be added to some people’s AWSOM Pixgallery galleries. This then totally screws up the links to the actual single image page causing 404 errors. I believe I have a fix for this issue, as well as a fix for the Visual Editor problem (where it doesn’t correctly populate the variable names for the tools). So far it has corrected the issue for one person, but I’d appreciate if anyone else is seeing this issue if they could go here: http://www.awsom.org/filerepository/awsompixgalleryabsolutefix2.zip and grab the test file and try this out. You may need to also set the option for “absolute linking” to yes in the Pixgallery options/settings page for the fix to work, but try it without that first. I’d really appreciate it if after trying this out please email me and let me know if it worked (or even more importantly) didn’t work to solve the problem.

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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 have a test file now available for the AWSOM News Announcement plugin that I hope starts to fix the major issues present in the Visual Editor in WordPress 2.5.1. The files are available at http://www.awsom.org/filerepository/awsomnewstinymcefix.zip . Simply unzip the folder and replace the files on your server with the ones in the zip file. This file does not fix the weird name problem (where the image popup window has only variable names displayed), but I think it fixes the major issue of changing absolute links to relative ones, which was breaking adding images using the add image function. The editor now looks more like the Post/Page version.

Please email me or comment here or at Harknell.com and let me know if the new file helps the situation.

UPDATE:I’ve decided to skip the idea of integrating with the built in WordPress tinyMCE and now have packaged a version of the Visual Editor directly into the AWSOM News plugin. Right now this is a test so literally every possible function is enabled. I can’t guarantee everything works in this test version though, so it’s for people who really need to use the Visual Editor and want to try out something immediately to see if it will work for them now. I’ll package up a formal update soon.

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