We just made a change with our databases that will enable support for international characters (like Chinese). For quite a while now our database tables have had the UTF-8 character encoding. However, up until now, our database connections were not explicitly setting the character set for the connection to be UTF-8. This meant that for certain types of queries the data returned was not returned as UTF-8 data, which made support for international characters broken.

This change should not affect existing content unless you were already using some international characters. If you are using HTML special characters like è for è then you are all set. However, if you suddenly see some strange characters on your pages and you haven't recently changed the content, then you'll just need to re-save the page with the correct international character and the page should display just fine.

Again, though, this update should not affect most websites.