We always use Christmas holidays in order to maintain our webservers. This Christmas we also did that. We upgraded Php version and also use MariaDb 10 as this version is really really fast!
We found the hard way that all Joomla 1.5 ( yes there are still joomla 1.5 ) have problem with the collation of the database when you use UTF 8 characters . After several experiments with collation we found in some blogs that the anwer is pretty easy. You have to change a line in the mysqli file in Joomla
This is a copy paste of the stackoverflow web site
in libraries/joomla/database/database/mysql.php
or (depending on your setting)
libraries/joomla/database/database/mysqli.php
comment the line 186
return ($verParts[0] == 5 || ($verParts[0] == 4 && $verParts[1] == 1 && (int)$verParts[2] >= 2));
and add this instead (assuming these days you’ll have unicode supported database:
return (1);
the code looks like:
function hasUTF()
{
$verParts = explode( ‘.’, $this->getVersion() );
// return ($verParts[0] == 5 || ($verParts[0] == 4 && $verParts[1] == 1 && (int)$verParts[2] >= 2));
return (1);
}