Hello all!!

I have been dealing here with a problem that probably someone has already been fighting with too and I need some advisory/explanations on how can I manage to put the three languages of my website to work all together! :) I have Portugues, English and Russia. I read, in the MySQL documentation that UTF-8 supports up to 650 languages and I decided to try to use this character set for my website. So, what did I do? I created a fresh database, being its collation and character set utf8_general_ci. I exported the old database to a .sql file. Changed all the occurrences of 'latin1', the default charset of MySQL, to 'utf8'. Imported this file to the new database and voilá!! All database tables are in utf8_general_ci. Now the problems started... first, when I go to the admin area and try to create a new category, I write the category name in russian but in the database it shows up like this :
& # 1041;& # 1080;& # 1085;& # 1086;& # 1082;& # 1083;& # 1080;
It was showing up like this before, before I changed all to utf8. So, what I decided? That I could edit the field by my own... I edited and changed this bunch of characters to "Бинокли", and when I get back to the site just a bunch of "???????" shows up... With Portuguese also happens the same... all the words with punctuation shows with a ? sign, for example "Bin?culos", when it should be "Binóculos".

Can anyone tell me what is the problem? How can I put all languages compatible? How can I put the database to write Russian characters? Is it some problem in the pages when they are connecting to the database server? How to correct it? I know nothing about PHP, unfortunately ... And another problem here is that search in Russian will not work for sure if in the database all this strange characters are being written...

Thank you all for a solution to this problem...

Cheers !