Problem: Umlaute are lost when exporting and importing mysql databases (phpmyadmin) Solution: thanks to http://www.skom.de/Verhindern-dass-Umlaute-beim.125.0.html 1. Create the db dump/export with phpmyadmin as usual. 2. Open the file with notepad on windows. 3. Save as and choose UTF-8 as coding. 4. Import the dump. Ready. For Linux: iconv --from-code=ISO-8859-1 --to-code= UTF-8 ./dump.sql > ./newdump.sql