Well, that could be a problem... Since it was my first try with MODx I didn’t have to consider this.
I do think UTF-8 is the way to go for all language as rthrash wrote. But the transition has to be easy, or else it’s not worth the bad user experience.
I know WordPress defaults to UTF-8, wonder how they handled the transition?
It should work by doing this:
First: Open the language file as ISO Latin 1 (ISO-8859-1) and change it to UTF-8 (and save it).
Second: Change "* Encoding: ISO-8859-1" to "* Encoding: UTF-8" in the language file header.
Third: In the admin interface, change Adminstration->Systeminställningar->Teckenkodning to "Unicode (UTF-8) - utf-8".
You don’t have to change the encoding of the language file - both iso-8859-1 and utf-8 is included in the distribution. Just chose the right one in Verktyg->Systeminställningar->Webbplatsen->Språk.
I’m not really sure how this works but what about already existing content? The settings in MODx only relates to the manager and it’s buildingblocks (quickedit etc) and text entered after the change. What happens to the text already in the database? Don’t you have to change the settings of the database as well (and the related settings in the MODx config file)? And possibly the encoding of the entire content?
That probably depends on what version of MySQL your using, and how it is integrated with the CMS itself.
I bet that the programmers of ModX know this better.