I burned a few nerve upgrading to Wordpress 2.2.2. The unicode character seems all jumbled up after upgrade to the new wordpress.
Since the computing world transition of bytes character set to Unicode are still on the way, I am not surprised that developer overlook the problem. Before year 2003, dealing with the international character Unicode is a messy task.
Today the complexity of enabling Unicode application are reduce. The web developer just need to take care the following 3 task.
- Enabled Unicode display support in the Web page. This is as simple as putting the UTF encoding header inside HTML page.
- If database is used, enable the database Unicode UTF8 character support
- Enabled UTF8 character encoding and reading in the programming code
And you can guess it, if the developer overlook any of the above step, you will either get scramble character, whether it is Chinese, Korean,Japan, Arabic,etc.
Since the recent upgrade give me scramble, I suspect the Wordpress version 2.2.2 downloaded has code that overlook the above Unicode support checklist. After restore my Wordpress to the older version, I create another directory and put Wordpress 2.2.2 there. By linking the new Wordpress to a new relative URL, http://caffienbar.com/wptest , I can create a staging environment for new version Wordpress. After login to this Wordpress 2.2.2 staging site, entering a few Chinese character, it is confirmed that the developer overlook either Unicode encoding part.
I will wait until a viable Unicode patch for Wordpress 2.2.2.