WampServer

Hi all,

I am new to this forum. If I made any wrong guess about WAMP, please forgive me and correct me.

Its seems that WAMP2 is not support utf-8 by default. Because if I install mysql directly then I can opt to select "best support for multilingualism" during installation, but I found the default charset of mysql is still latin1after WAMP installation. I guess most of you would agree with me, currently the tacitly agreed charset in most of website is utf-8, so why the designers of WAMP group still make this basic job so complicate?

Sorry, I am not complaining the designers or any contributers who provide their efforts to WAMP group; and I know that I am not even qualified to make any judgement as I am only a user without any contribution or enough level of knowledge.

However, after googling around for utf-8 and I found that I have to edit httpd.conf, my.ini, php.ini and convert the existing database inside mysql to utf-8 by myself then I started wondering why should I use WAMP? As it is likely to install apache/mysql/php/... separately by myself. I understand the web technology is still not a turn-key system yet, and people who wants to jump into this field must wet his or her hands by learning and praticing certain skills. But, does the purpose of WAMP is making life easier?

I have tried XAMPP in last few weeks too, its installation is as easy as WampServer; yet it tooks me two more weeks to run Mercury mail but still failed without figuring out the reason why. Anyway, I need a mail server to study Zen Cart so I tried hmailserver and it runs up within just feew hours. For this reason, I dropped XAMPP, as without the mail server than WAMP seems even easier to me. I do not know if I am right or wrong, but I am just a user who wnats to make my website running up sooner. I belive lots of people just like me, who is looking for something that he or she can count on for those basic setting then learn and accumulate new experience and new knowledge faster, instead of running everything basic on try-and-error base to invent a new wheel.

Thanks for everyone who reading this with your precious time,

eko