Old database convertions script (deprecated)

The old converter is the plugin Convert db2utf8 which was also stored in Github as utf8mb4-converter.

Please note this older version of the converter is no longer recommended; see Converting to UTF8 for up to date instructions.

Issues with the old converter under PHP 8

The old converter would fail silently when error conditions occurred if run under PHP 8. The new converter has fixed this issue.

Issues with the old converter (prior to 03/05/2021)

Versions of the old converter utf8mb4-conversion.php and the older version, which was called latin1-to-utf8-conversion.php, prior to 03/05/2021 had an issue with incorrectly removing default values during the conversion. A script exists to fix this issue; see the section “Missing Defaults” in the readme file for https://github.com/zencart/utf8mb4-converter.

Please note this issue only affects people who ran versions of this script prior to 03/05/2021.

You will know you have this issue if database insert operations are failing because fields don’t have default values. For example, creating a new admin will fail with

--> PHP Fatal error: 1364:Field 'prev_pass1' doesn't have a default value :: INSERT INTO admin
SET admin_name = 'admin',
admin_email = 'help@thatsoftwareguy.com',
admin_pass = '....',
admin_profile = 1,
pwd_last_change_date = now(),

You can also tell by schema inspection if you have this problem - instead of

  prev_pass1 varchar(255) NOT NULL default '' 

you will see

  prev_pass1 varchar(255) NOT NULL 

Similarly, creating a new customer account will fail with a message like

--> PHP Fatal error: 1364:Field 'customers_referral' doesn't have a default value :: INSERT INTO zen_customers 
...