ejesse

I was setting up a blog for friend and I ran into this. I hadn’t seen the solution that ended up working for me so I thought I’d post it.

There’s quite a bit on permissions on these threads and other blogs, as well as on php’s safe mode. Both those things can cause this error, so the only thing I’ll say is that you should never set chmod 777 on anything in your web folders. If 755 or 775 isn’t working for you, then either the group or user on the folder(s) is set incorrectly.

The other thing I found that can cause this error, and what was causing it for me, was PHP’s file upload settings. I think this is specific to using a setup with a webserver in front of PHP FCGI (as opposed to using mod_php, but I haven’t tested with mod_php), in which the webserver might be accepting the file size, but PHP hasn’t been setup in a similar fashion. So the webserver hands the file upload to PHP and PHP refuses it cause it’s too big. This throws an error back to the webserver which WordPress is interpreting as not having permission, even though the user/group permissions on the folder are correct.

To fix, update php.ini:

upload_max_filesize=50M
post_max_size=50M

That’s 50 megabytes. You might want to use another size, but that should cover most image and wordpress theme uploads.

More info here:

http://www.radinks.com/upload/config.php