After reading many threads about this problem I wanted to get confirmation wether I understood it correctly and get advice on how to handle the encoding.
Usually you advise to use utf-8 encoding, because it is more modern. Everyone who is updating his gallery and was on western encoding should use charsetmgr.php to convert the database entries to utf-8 encoding.
I noticed that many forums use western encoding, so everyone who uses a bridged coppermine might face some problems. I only noticed this problem, because I wanted to display cpg data on my forum by using cpmfetch. Some album titles were displayed incorrectly, because of the different character set of my forum.
To solve this, I was thinking of converting my utf-8 coppermine data to western encoding. The only problem is, that I would need to convert language file to iso-8859-1, too. I guess this is not the best solution:
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=34658.0
In that topic GauGau says that it only postpones the problem and you will have problems on the next update. Unfortunately he does not say what other choices you have.
I think one option would be to convert the forum data to utf-8. But I think this will give you problems on updating your forum.
My forum is phpbb2. I think the next version (phpbb3) will be out this year or beginning of 2008 the latest. phpbb3 also uses utf-8. This makes me wonder which of the above solutions are better for future upgrades (mainly to phpbb3, but also to coppermine 1.5)? Or are there any better solutions?
To convert Coppermine's language file I recommend using Uni2Me as suggested in
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=39694.msg189758#msg189758
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=20355.msg136219#msg136219
http://forum.coppermine-gallery.net/index.php?topic=27565.msg127489#msg127489
and various other threads.
If your textual content inside your database is in utf-8, you'll have to convert it as well, which is something that shouldn't be done lightheartedly. It's mandatory to backup your database before doing so.
I suggest trying for a solution the other way round: try to figure out if the content of phpBB can be converted to utf-8. Most BBS apps currently support utf-8 (at least SMF does).
Thank you for your advise!
I already converted the database with the included convertor without any problem. I also converted the default language file manually. I could not find any post regarding such a tool and I only remembered that one of you admins said it would not be necessary to download anything for conversion. It was not very hard to do it manually. But now I will use the tool you recommended, since there might be some other characters besides the language specific characters which needs to be converted and I haven' t converted the other language files.
I found this article about using utf-8 on phpbb2:
http://www.phpbb.com/kb/article.php?article_id=308
It looks much more complicated to switch phpbb to utf-8. You need to convert much more files and the various methods of converting the database do not look as trustworthy as cpg' s charsetmgr. The author also mentions a problem (no hightlight on search). Therefore I think it is easier to convert cpg to western encoding. And a future upgrade to phpbb3 might be easier as well, because the upgrade script might assume that you are on western encoding.