WordPress and MySQL 8

Hello,

I’m fan of new technologies and I love updates;))

For this reason, root.bg is now working on MySQL 8!

In this post I will share the special features of releasing version 8 and what we need to do our wordpress – especially if its base is large, old and with different types of charset and collation. To emphasize that I migrated from MariaDB 10.2 and for this purpose I picked up a new MySQL server – I did not do mysql_upgrade, and dump and restore the base!

More details about the new features in MySQL 8 can be found on their official site.

What is important for wordpress is precisely this :

• Character set support.  The default character set has changed from latin1 to utf8mb4. The utf8mb4 character set has several new collations, including utf8mb4_ja_0900_as_cs, the first Japanese language-specific collation available for Unicode in MySQL. For more information, see Section 10.10.1, “Unicode Character Sets”.

This is the problem I encountered after I poured the root.bg base of the new mysql server. Here are all the publications written in Cyrillic:

The reason for this is the encoding in MySQL.

This problem can be solved in two ways – by setting it on the server itself or in our wordpress configuration file.

Here are two ways:

In MySQL:

character-set-server=latin1

We can test this from mysql console:

SHOW VARIABLES LIKE 'character\_set\_%';

and we should see this result :

+--------------------------+---------+
| Variable_name | Value |
+--------------------------+---------+
| character_set_client | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_connection | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_database | latin1 |
| character_set_filesystem | binary |
| character_set_results | utf8mb4 |
| character_set_server | latin1 |
| character_set_system | utf8 |
+--------------------------+---------+
7 rows in set (0.00 sec)

In wordpress:

In the wordpress configuration file – wp-config.php, we add the following line:

define('DB_CHARSET', 'latin1');

And now we have a working wordpress on MySQL 8!

P.S.
root.bg lives on :
ubuntu 18.04.1
nginx 1.14.0
php 7.2.11
mysql 8.0.13
memcached 1.5.6

Thats it!