My search for a nice and easy tumble blog I can host myself lead me in a pretty straight line to Gelato CMS. But when I looked into the database after I had been playing around with it a bit I saw that all umlauts (äöü for you non-umlaut knowing ignoramus people) turned to garbage.
After I had tried to change the database collation a few times (gotta love MySQL for having like a bangzillion of encodings) I struck me that Gelato probably just didn't talk UTF8 to the database. A few minutes of code review later (heck who writes code in Spanish or Italian or whatever that is? and encodes it in latin?!) I came up with a minimal patch that makes Gelato speak proper UTF8.
In the file gelato/classes/mysql_conenction.class.php search for the function conectar and change the return lines (around line 64) to this:
<?php
mysql_query("SET NAMES utf8;", $this->mid_conexion);
return $this->mid_conexion;
?>