diff --git a/common.inc.php b/common.inc.php
index 0b22585..a636506 100644
--- a/common.inc.php
+++ b/common.inc.php
@@ -22,6 +22,12 @@
 */
 ?>
 <?
+//if we dont set the charset any page that doesnt call send_header() (where it used to be set) would defualt to the server's encoding,
+//which in many cases (like ysf-fsj.ca/sfiab) is UTF-8.  This was causing a lot of the newly AJAX'd editors to fail on french characters,
+//becuase they were being encoded improperly.  Ideally, all the databases will be switched to UTF-8, but thats not a near-term possibility,
+//so this is kind of a band-aid solution until we can make everything UTF8.  Hope it doesnt break anything anywhere else!
+header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"); 
+
 //set error reporting to not show notices, for some reason some people's installation dont set this by default
 //so we will set it in the code instead just to make sure
 error_reporting(E_ALL ^ E_NOTICE); 
@@ -374,7 +380,6 @@ function send_header($title="", $nav=null, $icon=null, $titletranslated=false)
 	if($HEADER_SENT) return;
 	else $HEADER_SENT=true;
 	
-	header("Content-Type: text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"); 
 	echo "<?xml version=\"1.0\" encoding=\"iso-8859-1\" ?>\n";
 ?>
 <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd"> 
