Thread

Hey, I am moving my whole site to a new server but I have several problems.

1. When i go to my new server and go to “publish” > “edit” I can see that all entries that is written Cyrillic titles to have their characters replaced with question marks.

2. Only a few of my sites pages are actually working on the new site. Most pages aren’t fully loaded and misses bits of data. I first had lots of data missing in the actual template manager templates (the HTML code just ended half way down), but as I also save all templates as files I tried to synchronize the templates and it seems to have completed the templates that sits in my template manager. However, even if this fixed some part on some pages most pages are still corrupt and my guess is that I’m missing snippets and global variable data as well. (for reasons I don’t know)

—- I wonder if this could all have to do with the database export/import. There are a lot of settings that I can change when I export my database and I don’t know if there is perhaps some setting I’m missing that causes all this (database somehow being corrupt when I export or import it?). Both servers use PhPmyAdmin (just different versions). I use UTF8 when I import but a lot of my tables seem to use other formats (looking at at their collation names on old server). Once all tables are imported they have the exact same collation on the new server tho (even tho I stated I’d use UTF8).

This is very frustrating! Really hope you can help me with this :(

Thanks,
Johan Hedin

Hi Johan,

This must be frustrating! Just to make sure we’re covering our basics, have you followed these steps first?

Now, it does indeed sound like there is a difference between your old database and your new database and the way they each treat character sets. Could you check with each host to see what the default character set for their MySQL databases is? (This may differ from the character set used by each table.)

When you set up ExpressionEngine originally, was it an EE 1 installation or an EE 2 installation? Was there anything done to alter the default database character set that EE is meant to use?

Hey, yes I have followed those steps. I have an EE 2.10 install (that I will upgrade if/when I get the server switch working). On my old (current working server) it says the following in phpMyAdmin (Home):

Language: English (en-iso-8859-1)
MySQL charset: cp1252 West European (latin1)

When I go to “Structure” to see my actual database, I have a lot of different Collations on different tables. In the sum (125 tables) column it says (latin1_swedish_ci).

On my new server it says:

MySQL charset: UTF-8 Unicode (utf8)
MySQL connection collation: utf8_general_ci

Versions of the phpMyAdmin are totally different on the two servers and look nothing the same so I’m not sure I’m comparing the right stuff.

I have tried to import the database as UTF-8. Didn’t work so tried Windows 1252 and didn’t work. Is the default charset something you can’t change?

Thanks,
Johan

Hmm… when that doesn’t look right to me. I think we’ll be able to get you help on this more quickly if we can have a first-hand look. Be on the lookout for an email from me.

Hey again, I sent the login details yesterday. I have converted the database to UTF-8 and even if the Cyrillic and some polish and perhaps some more texts aren’t working I’m think of maybe go with what I have now and add all texts manually (could there be other more “technical” errors because of the database being in the wrong format? Most things seem to work). Adding the characters/text manually probably takes 1-2 days (we have people who could do that), but the updating of the server is frozen and I’m really grateful that you will try to help me. However I just don’t have the time to wait a day or two for every reply for much longer. We have big problems with our old server and the new one aren’t working and some 100 companies will soon start to push me even harder on this. I’ll need to get the new server working this weekend.

I would be very grateful if you could give me some answer on if I should go with the problematic database I have now or if you can help me as soon as possible.

Thanks,
Johan

Just posting a note here to let onlookers know that we’re working with Johan privately on this for the time being. I’ll post an update back here once we have something to share!