Just a note for those who has problems with umlauts in a German forum with charset utf8 (so you can display cyrillic fonts or arabic or whatever, too). The problem occured with PHP5 and MySQL 5.

I had a hard time figuring out why on heaven the umlauts where displayed as ?, e.g. l?schen instead of löschen. Last night I resolved the problem in adding the following line to functions.php immediately after mysql_connect() and mysql_select_db():

mysql_query('SET NAMES utf8')

Hope, this helps. irene