General

Character Set

Moin uses Unicode internally, and utf-8 for external output and input, like pages, HTML output and translation files. The external character set is defined in config.charset to utf-8. This setting is fine for all languages, as any character can be encoded in UTF-8. You should not change this value, although technically it is possible.

Certain options must use Unicode values. For example, the site name could contain German umlauts or French accents or be in Chinese or Hebrew. Because of this, you must use unicode strings for those items. Unicode strings are defined by prefixing the letter u to the string. Here are some examples:

    # Site name, used by default for wiki name-logo [Unicode]
    sitename = u"Jürgen's Wiki"
    # another example:
    sitename = u'הוויקי של יורגן'

Read the comments in the configuration file - they tell you which options must use Unicode values.

Notes:

International Setup

The default configuration file shipped with moin uses iso-8859-1 coding. This is fine for Latin languages like English or German, but not usable for non-latin languages. If you want to have non-latin characters in your configuration items, use utf-8 coding for the config file.

Set the first line of all configuration files to this line:

# -*- coding: utf-8 -*-

Values using unicode strings can be recognized by their default value being u"...." or ur"..." (the u means unicode) or when the description explicitly tells [unicode].

For ready made configuration in your language, see ConfigMarket. Read also the section about unicode options.

Customization of user preferences

You can predefine, disable or remove several options in the user preferences, see HelpOnConfiguration/UserPreferences.