One of the first steps for installing The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding© (“TNG”) is to create the MySQL database. I use phpMyAdmin to do this either online at my host or on my local WampServer testbed (Figure 1).

After entering the database name—and unless you are very sure about changing them—use the defaults for both collation and the mySQL connection collation (Figure 2). By default, mySQL will use latin1_swedish_ci for the collation (West European, including english). After clicking the “Create” button, the database is created. That’s all there is to creating the database. The TNG installer will later fill in the tables.

Once the TNG files have been unzipped, browsing to the readme.html file makes installation a snap. During the installation, you are asked about what language and character set you want to use. Again, unless you are sure, use the default: the default is to use English and the ISO-8859-1 (Latin 1) character set. Figure 3 shows the language and character set selection in step 5 of the Express Installation.

Choosing the wrong character set can affect the display of data. The notes display shows this problem. Figure 4 shows notes with special characters, such as “õ” and “ü.” Figure 5 shows what happens when the correct character set is not selected: note the “?” where the character is not part of the character set.

TNG and mySQL have many language and character-set options. However, for West European genealogists (including english speakers), the mySQL and TNG defaults are good choices.

http://lythgoes.net/genealogy/software.php — The Next Generation of Genealogy Sitebuilding© (“TNG”)

http://www.wampserver.com/en/ — WampServer

http://www.w3schools.com/tags/ref_entities.asp — W3Schools HTML ISO-8859-1 Reference