Repair my client site

I'm an hardware technician, and my client have a site that was build under cakephp 2.xx. A few weeks ago, his server hard drive crashed (a linux server build on ubuntu 12.04 + Apache2 + Postgresql 8.4 + PHP 5.3). The server was not doing the backups in a rightful manner, but i managed to build the server, with the same software specs (mainly because of PHP version.... if any higher, the site will not work). Unfortunattely, there are a few things that are not working, and i think it has to do mainly with the database encoding. Whenever we try to see a previous "scheduled appointment" in the database, or if we try to set a new "appointment", the browser show's me a white page with some strange characters. I live in Portugal, the encoding i'm using is "[login to view URL]". In Portugal, we use some accents in characters like : "á, ç, ã" and some others. The wierd thing, is that i installed phppgadmin in the server, and in this interface, all characters shows nicelly. In the picture i'm posting... the first text that show on the browser page is : "Marcações", and it should be "Marcações". My primary goal is for the site to shows properly. I will supply access to a virtual machine, cloned from the real server, but with a stripped database. And... i will have to be supplied with all the steps necessary to repair my customer site (unless all the changes are made in PHP code, and for that i will only have to copy the files from one place to another). My secondary goal (if the price is right) is for the code made with cakephp, to be upgraded for the latest cakephp version, so that it runs on PHP 7.x.