I'm strugelling with strange problem. My hosting provider do not offer cpanel with PHP config option (i know, disaster). For the purpouses of my website I had to change PHP version from 5.2 to 5.5. So admin told me i can use htaccess and command: AddHandler php5.5-fastcgi php
And ok - it activates proper PHP version, but what is totally strange -> change totally my mysql database encoding. The output is following - all posts, pages etc. which were previously displayed in my native language (polish) right now do not display polish diacritic symbols. I've tried to change the whole database collation to UTF8_general_CI yet it didnt solve the problem. I use wordpress as cms, but the issue appears also in my own cms, as well as plain php with mysql. Any ideas how to change that? thanks!