I prefer UTF-8, always.
I am sorry to see Xoops new release is by default still ISO-8859-1 encoded. Unfortunately, Xoops have not provided a complete reference book for all smarty tags. I struggled to change the charset.
First, I looked at theme.html, and found it is
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=<{$xoops_charset}>" />
instread of
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=ISO-8859-1" />
Although I could erase “<{$xoops_charset}>” and put in “UTF-8”, I knew it was not the best way to change the default encoding.
So I began to search for where the smarty tag $xoops_charset is saved. I thought Xoops the adminstration interface had a place to change the charset. I went through each field in Site Preferences and found nowhere to set the charset.
It becomes a guess work for me where which value was stored. I searched the database but I could not find any value is “ISO-8859-1”.
Last method I used was a global search for the string “ISO-8859-1” in all Xoops source files. 16 hits. “/language/english/global.php” was likely to affect $xoops_charset. I opened it and changed a line from
define('_CHARSET', 'UTF-8');
to
define('_CHARSET', 'UTF-8');
Then, UTF-8 encoding is successfully changed.