Wordpress cannot write to directory using Apache webserver

Published by Peter McLarty | Filed under open source

I have been working on building a new website over the last few days for a business and had a problem that I found isn’t well answered in the forums. The problem appeared when I went to install the first of the plugins I use to optimize the site for Search engines or doing SEO. The blog site is all up so I logged in as the administrator went to the plugins install and tried to upload and install the plug in and then found that I couldn’t do it. The problem was I was getting an error “cannot create directory” I couldn’t find what I was looking for as most of the information in the forums seems to be related to hosted server services. I was building on a self hosted service. I tried a few of the things such as changing owners on directories and files and found that nothing was working. Log files were a bit ambiguous. Then I started thinking about all my hosted sites I had built and came to the conclusion that this was not a Wordpress problem and it wasn’t a problem with the Wordpress plug in, but it was a problem with Apache. The problem it turned out was permissions that are default set in Apache to secure directory access in Apache. The fix was to create an entry
<Directory xxx/xxx/xxxx/wp-content>
Order Deny,Allow
Allow from all
</Directory>

Hopefully this is useful to someone in the future building Wordpress on their own server or troubleshooting a hosted service that may not have been fully set up correctly and not compromise their system using bad choices for file and directory permissions at the operating system level. There is still an issue here that I resolved with 777 on the upload directory, I will be researching that more before allowing the site to go live to determine that there is no security issues with that. It is something I am not so happy about, maybe 775 will be enough.

Otherwise Wordpress itself was a flawless installation as usual, Only have a plugin that has a problem but it might just need an update for 2.9 all my other plugins seem  fine

See ya round

Peter

As for what I use for SEO tweaks well check out this site here I also use a good SEO template as a starting point.

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