Using Tamil Font in WordPress Site

We had an issue with this on our site and since the postings in the forum are providing solutions with outdated plugins that don’t work, here’s how we got it working.

To get Tamil font on your website, you need to change something called the “CHARSET” in your database.

To do this:

1) Open phpMyAdmin in your website control panel (this is not the same as your wordpress dashboard – you need to ask your web hosting provider if you do not know where phpMyAdmin is)

2) Go to your database and click EXPORT. Choose QUICK. Choose .SQL and click GO

3) Save the exported file on your desktop. Call it original.sql

4) COPY the original.sql file and save the copy as changed.sql MAKE SURE YOUR original.sql FILE IS STORED SAFELY. IT IS A BACKUP INCASE ANYTHING GOES WRONG.

5) Open changed.sql in Notepad

6) Do a find and replace. Find for all CHARSET=latin1 and replace with CHARSET=utf8 then save the file

7) Go back to phpMyAdmin and tick/select all the tables then click DROP to delete them

8) After deleting, click on IMPORT and click the “Choose File” button and choose the changed.sql file. Then click Go.

9) After the importing is complete (it will say something like Imported 17772 records successfully), go back to your WordPress, try typing a new post with some tamil text, publish and check it out. And hopefully it is working for you.

If anything goes wrong and it doesn’t work, or this ends up breaking your site, go back to phpMyAdmin, select all the tables and DROP them. Then import the original.sql file back to restore the database.

Hope this helps the non-techies out there.