If you’ve just upgraded to WordPress 2.9 and you are now getting UTF 8 conversion errors on your dashboard, you’ll need to take a look at WordPress Trac Ticket #11219.
RSS Error: The data could not be converted to UTF-8
The bottom line is that you’ll need to enable either iconv or mbstring in your PHP configuration. I’m using CoolStack on Solaris 10, so it was a simple matter of uncommenting the following lines from /opt/coolstack/php5/lib/php.ini and restarting apache. While you’re at it, may as well uncomment ctype as well since the new image uploader needs it.
Uncommnet the following lines in /opt/coolstack/php5/lib/php.ini.
extension=iconv.so
extension=mbstring.so
extension=ctype.so
Finally, restart apache:
svcadm restart apache22-csk
