Yes, I skipped the beta 2 release, because once I had finished beta 2, I decided to implement additional features.

So, in addition for the new features in vCC 2.0 generation, what’s new in this release?

1 – previously, you can choose only the new character set of your database structure, and the new collation were set to the the default one of the new character set. Now you can choose the new collation of your database structure too.

2 – Upon installing or upgrading, vCC will try to set the appropriate settings for you, assuming you want to convert to UTF-8.

3 – A brief of vCC settings will be shown before you proceed with the conversion.

In case you choose to convert the collation only, the previous confirmation will be like this:

4 – To save more bandwidth and more server resources, and to make the conversion clear and easy, AJAX IS IMPLEMENTED. Now steps will be listed and associated with their status. some steps will redirect you to new pages (steps that don’t use AJAX – , and others will have a progress indicator inline.

5 – New jsProgressBarHandler (Dynamic Unobtrusive Javascript Progress/Percentage Bar) from bram.us had been implemented.

6 – New mini icons from famfamfam.com had been used too.

7 – A new step had been added to truncate the table postindex. In some forums it’s very huge table, in spite of there is no need to convert this table, it causes timeout when its collation is altered. so now it’s truncated to avoid that.

8 – A new step had been added to allow you to confirm the tables that you want to convert their content charset and their collations, and to make it possible to exclude tables from the process according to your desire.

Please note that you can’t include tables – that vCC refuses to convert – in conversion process, to avoid any possible technical errors.

There is no need to convert a table that:
a) is empty.
b) hasn’t any PRIMARY KEY column.
c) hasn’t any convertable column.
d) isn’t prefixed by TABLE_PREFIX in case it’s defined.

This step is mainly created to allow you to exclude tables from conversion in case they:
a) belong to another script.
b) have the same charset of the destination charset.
c) have different charset from the source charset.

9 – Also the conversion process has its own page, where the convertable tables are listed, each table has its own green progress bar. also there are an overall red progress bar.

10 – New link in the vCC cp nav had been added to reset the steps. This link is for advanced users only, so it won’t be shown unless you enable the debug mode.

I don’t advise to reset the steps if you went into “Convert Database” step, otherwise you may convert the content twice. Also this doesn’t reverse what the steps had done, it only allows you to start over again.

11 – More tweaks and fixes had been done here and there.

Please continue to report your problems and bugs.

vCC is something must be tried even if you don’t need it. it’s very nice experience.

Best regards