Knowledgebase

Question

I need to run my site in a language that uses a non-western character set. Is this possible?

Answer

Updated 05 March 2008

In v6.116, CactuShop underwent a wide-ranging overhaul to fully support unicode - a large character set incorporating most of the world's major writing systems.

There is a config setting in CactuShop - 'enableunicode', which switches on the support for non-western character sets. This modifies SQL queries where necessary and sets the encoding type of back end pages.

We have also modified the upload.asp script to handle image uploads on unicode operating systems.

You will need to set your skin to use UTF-8 as a character set instead of the default 'windows-1252' encoding. In your skin replace this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=windows-1252" />

With this:

<meta http-equiv="Content-Type" content="text/html; charset=utf-8" />

Known Issues

1. The upload script may still have problems writing to folders where there are non-western character sets in the full local path name. Avoiding use of non-western characters in folder names should avoid this.

2. SEO friendly URLs will not work if you have products or categories with non-western characters in their names. The web requires that URLs (including subfolders) contain western character sets only. Therefore you should turn off the 'fakelinks' config setting if some or all of your products or categories contain non-western characters.


Although we have tested this functionality ourselves, it is impossible for us to test every language version of Windows, or indeed with every language. Therefore we cannot guarantee that it will handle all possible languages and Windows versions without problems.

We suggest testing with our free trial version first to ensure that it works with the server and language you intend running with. You should test the image upload functionality as well as adding and updating products in the language you intend using.

Can't find the answer you need? Click here to open a support ticket.