Illegal Collations

do you know what the default is for 2.5? Several of the default 2.5 tables have different collations.

My tables all have "utf8_general_ci" so I guess that's the default collation for utf8. But that probably also can be changed in the server settings.

Joomla only wants the tables to be in the utf8 charset, the collation doesn't matter as long as it is set consistent for all tables.

I finally merged Joomla 1.5 to Joomla 2.5 and SermonSpeaker from 3.4.3 to 4.4.11 and I ran into this same issue when making the final upgrade from SermonSpeaker 4.0 to 4.4.11.

I migrated a hostgator hosted Joomla 1.5 site where the dB collation was set for utf8_unicode_ci to a hostgator Joomla 2.5 site where the collation is utf8_general_ci.

As explained in this thread, the issue can be fixed by manually changing the table collations of the migrated SermonSpeaker tables to match the rest of the database, including the new tables that SermonSpeaker 4.4.11 creates.

So, in my case, I used phpMyAdmin to manually edit the structure of every row of the sermon_series, sermon_sermons, sermon_speakers tables, changing the collation to utf8_general_ci. Afterwards, I used the Operations tab on each table to change the default collation for each table to utf8_general_ci.

This was helpful:
answers.yahoo.com/question/index?qid=20090319040418AAGvbXz
along with other searches for 'phpmyadmin change database table collation'

Thanks for the help in this thread.

i believe there is a component called admin tools by akeeba that can change them all at once.