Getting CKEditor to work with charset="ISO-8859-1"

In some websites for clients of me it is necessary to use charset="ISO-8859-1". Now I am trying to add Power CMS to such a website. Through the help of some forum-threads I managed to get this right so far that all the "special german characters" are correctly inserted in the database and if I make changes to the text in the cms admin the changes are also correctly displayed on the website.

What is not correctly displayed are the text in the "alt" and "title" tags of images.

If I newly upload a content area at first the text of these tags are correctly inserted in the database and are also correctly displaying on the website. But if I make any change in the cms admin and click update they are then displayed false.

As I said this happens only to the text of the "alt" and "title" tags of images. Normal text is displayed correctly - this I managed through the following changes in the contents_update.php and contents_insert.php:

- setting the meta charset tags to "ISO-8859-1" and the
- $CKEditor_config["entities"] to "true"

So the "charset-workflow" between Dreamweaver, the database and the cms admin seems to be right in "ISO-8859-1" -
except this window in CKEditor where the image tags and details can be changed. This seems to be still in Utf8 and messes it up.

How can I address this issue?

Here is a url of a test-page. You can see the issue with the title-tag if you mouse over the images.

http://www.katzenwendeltreppe.de/test_test.php

Thank you!
Henrik

Does somebody know how to address this issue?

Thanks in advance!
Henrik

use the UTF-8 character set instead.

make sure the meta tag is set to utf-8 and also update the Connectsion/PowerCMSConnections.php file to use the UTF-8 character set.

change:

$PowerCMSConnection = mysql_pconnect($hostname_PowerCMSConnection, $username_PowerCMSConnection, $password_PowerCMSConnection) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR);

to:

$PowerCMSConnection = mysql_pconnect($hostname_PowerCMSConnection, $username_PowerCMSConnection, $password_PowerCMSConnection) or trigger_error(mysql_error(),E_USER_ERROR); 

mysql_set_charset('utf8',$PowerCMSConnection);

the utf 8 character set can display the german characters as well as the ISO-8859-1 one can

Thank you, Jason!

I know using utf8 could be a solution for this part of the problem ...

But the reason why I use sometimes "ISO-8859-1" is that some older email clients don't correctly display the "special german characters" in contact-form-messages if the charset of the site is "utf8" (I guess this are older versions of Outlook or so, which can't handle utf8 ?!?).

However, since I don't know an easy solution I could give to my clients to change that I do what I can do on my side and use the charset "ISO-8859-1" instead. Then these messages display correctly.

Thatswhy my question: is there a way to resolve that issue WITH using "ISO-8859-1" ?

Thanks again!
Henrik

The heart of the problem is the database character set in the connection.

try using UTF8 for the connection character set like suggested above, this way you can still use the ISO character set on the pages, but the connection to the database will use UTF8.

The default Latin 1 character set does not support german characters, and UTF8 is the closest character set available for the database connection.

I 've tried that but it didn't solved the problem.

But I found that my client could change the character set in his email client - and now it works with UTF-8.

Easy solution - no more struggling with character sets - hopefully ;-)

Thanks for the help!
Henrik