Help with plugins for Wordpress and .htaccess

Scam · 8 Feb 2006 at 11:47

Hi all, I've been using Wordpress for my blog for a couple of weeks now and i'm liking it. Yesterday i decided to try out some plugins. Some fun ones like random Simpsons quote generator, RSS feeds, and also WP-DB Backup. Essentially, none of them worked as none of my directories are writable.

eg. with WP-DB Backup i get the errors in Wordpress:

WARNING: Your wp-content directory is NOT writable! We can not create the backup directory.
/home/m2lnet/public_html/blog/wp-content/backup-119bc/

and

WARNING: Your backup directory is NOT writable! We can not create the backup directory.
/home/m2lnet/public_html/blog/

I know this has something to do with .htaccess - can anyone tell me what i need to put in a .htaccess file to make this work. Currently i have none in any of my WP folders as far as i know, and i've never used one before. Thanks!

Augmented · 8 Feb 2006 at 14:29

This is an issue with permissions on the server-side.
You'll need to change the relevant directory permissions through FTP - how you do this depends on your FTP client.
Typically you'll want to CHMOD the directory to either 755, or if that doesn't work 777, but there are more secure options depending on your host's setup. - Example CHMOD guide: http://www.help.thinkhost.com/web-development/unix/chmod-tutorial_197.html

robmiller · 8 Feb 2006 at 15:48

Make sure you're not running PHP in Safe Mode, too.

Scam · 8 Feb 2006 at 16:56

Thanks guys.

Augmented said:
..but there are more secure options depending on your host's setup.

I'm with HR and thus have this CP, could you point me in the right direction of doing it through there? Also as robmiller says, how would i make sure about turning off PHP safe mode?

I'll look into chmod, i remember doing something with that a good while ago.

EDIT: Using SmartFTP its easy, it reported that my blog.2m2l.net folder was at 755, so i tried 777 and did all subfolders/files as well. I realised this probably wasnt wise, so i did a quick backup of my Wordpress DB and then reverted everything under blog/ to 755. Is that ok? I would like to set it up properly though so i can try other plugins