Hi fellow xoopsers !

I have some questions about character encoding in xoops.

I am a user of Traditional Chinese version of XOOPS which is equipped with "big-5" encoded "tchinese" language packs. Recently, when I tried to integrate Gallery 2 into my website, I got strange characters displayed on my pages. After searching posts in Gallery's forum, I found it's caused by a conflict between the "utf-8" encoded Gallery 2 and my XOOPS site.

This make me think of the questions of character encoding. So besides language packs, do we need to add some special handling in the php files in order to support different character encodings ?

Moreover, can I directly apply the update patches released by xoops.org instead of those by our local support sites ?

Thank You very much !