WebCollab Unicode 1.62 Released!

We are pleased to announce the release of the WebCollab Unicode 1.62 package, intended to partner the standard WebCollab 1.62a (Canopus) package.

The default WebCollab package uses the ISO-8859-x character set like most other web-based software. This works well for Western European originated languages, but has two major
disadvantages:

- Each ISO-8859-x character set only works for a narrow set of languages. For instance, German and Bulgarian use ISO-8859-1 and IS0-8859-5 respectively, and cannot be mixed.

- Other languages (not originating in Western Europe) have varying support.

The WebCollab-Unicode package uses the Unicode (UTF-8) character set, which natively supports over 650 languages. UTF-8 is a truly international character set. Unicode implementation in software is relatively new; the following are minimium requirements for this package:

Database: MySQL 4.1, or higher (see release notes for earlier versions)
PostgreSQL (all versions have Unicode support)

PHP: 4.3.0, or higher - with support for mb_strings compiled in

To graphically see the advantages of Unicode on your screen take a look at:

http://www.columbia.edu/kermit/utf8.html

You may need to choose appropriate fonts for your web browser to get a full display of all characters - many fonts will only display basic Latin and selected other characters.

This release contains much more robust and secure UTF-8 parsing code. The code parser has been successfully tested against a UTF-8 'torture and stress' test page. (http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~mgk25/ucs/examples/UTF-8-test.txt)