Hi,

I'm upgrading from 1.4.5.1 to 1.4.5.9 but I get this error :

"The Zenphoto filesystem character define is UTF‑8 [which seems wrong]
Error!

If your server filesystem character set is different from UTF‑8 and you create album or image filenames names containing characters with diacritical marks you may have problems with these objects.

Change the filesystem character set define to"

I have had this problem in the past but it doesn't seem to be an issue and it still allows me to upgrade. Should I be doing something to correct it?

My photos and folders are originally created in Windows 7 home prem edition before I SFTP them to my Ubuntu server. Is this whats causing the character set errors?

Any help greatly appreciated.

BTW how can I get involved from the front end I would like to contribute specifically to javascript side of things.

This is bascially a problem if you use special chars like "umlauts" or accented ones in file or folder names. Many servers have issues with those although it technically could work. Zenphoto can try to check that via a file as noted on the setup page.

[i]BTW how can I get involved from the front end I would like to contribute specifically to javascript side of things.[/i]
You can contribute via our GitHub repo using tickets and/or pull requests if you find bugs or have feature ideas.

Please also read:
http://www.zenphoto.org/news/general-contributor-guidelines

thanks, I check out the contributor guidelines.

my file and folder names have spaces as well as "-" in them.

Then you probably don't need to care about that warning (which it is, no error). For example on local installs on Macs that check fails anyway for some Mac reasons.

I get this error even on Windows (both locally on XAMPP and on the live server which is on Apache). I got that message even when I knew that both the database and theme files were encoded as UTF-8 (with explicit declaration in the theme headers). I have come to consider it as a "guideline" or a "warning", but I agree that it would be intimidating for a new user, especially one with little technical background and no experience with non-US characters.

Is there a way to better check the filesystem character encoding and the database encoding to make sure of the encoding that was actually used in previous versions? Maybe a field in the database table that would effectively say what encoding has been used previously?
If not, maybe the wording could be similar to what we see in a new install; something like: "Zenphoto cannot reliably determine what has been used previously. We generally recommend that you use UTF-8, but you may change it if you know that you have used another encoding previously or if you see that accented and special characters are printed strangely on your screen.

@laingalistair
File and folder names with spaces, hyphens and underscores are not a problem. But accented letters, diphtongs (æ and œ) and especially punctuation (!?') will cause problem.

I got that message even when I knew that both the database and theme files were encoded as UTF-8 (with explicit declaration in the theme headers).

Don't confuse those. This really means the file system (file name) encoding only! All those others and the one that PHP uses internally for working with variables can technically be different.

Zenphoto requires a special file to check that as indicated on the setup form to determine the file system encoding. Although on Mac OS it is UTF-8 it does always fail on my local MAMP installs. So I just ignore it.

The most hasslefree approach is to still follow the old recommendation to avoid all kinds of special chars to be on the save side always (remember I am German and we have some of those, too). Which is why the seo_zenphoto plugin tries to clear them if you upload or create new pages/articles like lots of other CMS do.