Change record status: 
Project: 
Introduced in branch: 
7.x
Introduced in version: 
7.50
Description: 

Sites using any database driver supported by Drupal core now have a way to configure the site to allow emojis and other multi-byte UTF-8 characters.

For MySQL and equivalent, the database configuration must meet a particular set of requirements, and enabling this feature also requires editing of the site's settings.php file and potentially other steps. For further information, and details on how to enable this, see the documentation page.

Your site's Status Report page will also provide more information with a link to this documentation page. There is no administrative interface for configuring this feature yet.

PostgreSQL and SQLite will continue to support multi-byte UTF-8 (as they previously did) without any configuration.

For authors of other database drivers

For database drivers provided by contributed modules (such as MS SQL server), it is now possible for the driver's code to indicate to Drupal core whether it supports this feature and whether or not doing so requires additional settings.php configuration. The default is for Drupal core to assume that it may not be supported, although that assumption will not prevent multi-byte UTF-8 characters from being stored and displayed if in fact the database driver does have this support. To change the default assumptions, database drivers can implement the following methods:

Impacts: 
Site builders, administrators, editors
Module developers
Updates Done (doc team, etc.)
Online documentation: 
Not done
Theming guide: 
Not done
Module developer documentation: 
Not done
Examples project: 
Not done
Coder Review: 
Not done
Coder Upgrade: 
Not done
Other: 
Other updates done