I've got a site running SilverStripe and they hardcode the server encoding into one of their core files. This causes a problem with my RSS feed and it fails validation (and causes problems in some of the tools I want to use the feed in) - see http://feedvalidator.org/check.cgi?url=http://www.andrewking.co.nz/pm/news/rss I have two choices change the server encoding on the account - but it's a shared host change the server encoding in the core file and have an upgrade headache I get the feeling I'm going to have to run with #2 but thought I'd just check here first - can I change the server encoding?
If they have setup the application to speficy the server encoding then more then likey #2 is the best way to go (you don't know if #1 will effect your site as a whole) you can just use a header(); function in php to spit out a encoding header... just make sure you document it so when you upgrade it's all good =)