Setup WordPress for Both English & Chinese Languages

I have set up this wordpress blog primarily using English as 1st language. However, sometimes I do like to write in Chinese as well. I found that there is a way you can set up the blog for using both english & chinese. Here’s the step by step guide that I went through.

Setup WordPress for Both English & Chinese Languages

1. Open phpMyAdmin in CPanel

In order to type chinese on your blog, you will need to change some settings inside the SQL database. Firstly, you will need to login to your CPanel, then open phpMyAdmin as followed:

phpMyAdmin in CPanel

2. Select Database & Table of Your Blog

After launching the phpMyAdmin screen, you will need to select the database of your blog on the pull down menu. Once you have selected the database, you will be able to see all the existing tables of the database showing right below the pull down menu.

Select Database & Table in phpMyAdmin

3. Set Collation to utf8_unicode_ci

Click on the database table, you will see the table structure appearing on the right hand side of the screen. In order to store chinese in the database, you need to change the collation setting from latin1_swedish_ci to utf8_unicode_ci.

To change the collation setting, click on the pencil button and you will be a pop up window appearing. Scroll on the pull down menu to select utf8_unicode_ci and save the setting.

You need to go through this steps for all the fields that has existing setting of latin1_swedish_ci. You also need to repeat this step for all tables in the database as well.

Set utf8_unicode_ci in phpMyAdmin

You are Done… Good Luck to You!

After completing the above mentioned steps, you should be able to type and store chinese text (中文） like I do. I suppose you should be able to do this for all other asian language as well. But I have never tried that. Maybe you can share with me if you do have some success on that.

All the best and enjoy blogging in your asian language…