File ownership (not permission) issue

Hello,

I have my WP (2.0.3) sites running at Pair Networks (no problems with Pair, been customer for 9 years).

I upgraded my 2 WP sites overnight to 2.0.3. However, for one of them, I could not FTP the uploads directory to my local computer, nor could I delete/view it via FTP or any other way (using Pair’s account web interface).

On the other — no problems at all.

So I had to manually delete all of the WP files and then manually upload via FTP (rather than untar quickly and just restore the “keep this when upgrading” content such as themes, uploads, plugins etc.

However, I found out how I caused the problem and want to share it: for one of the blogs, I had the “uploads” folder set to permissions 707, not 777.

This meant I got a 553 permission denied error when trying to view the folder structure WordPress was using to store images.

As I’m using a hosting provider, I cannot use the CHOWN command to fix the problem myself. I have to put in a support request (I don’t have a problem with that scenario).

Thankfully, the site was only created this week, so I:

1. Used CHMOD and changed “uploads” to 777.

2. Changed the WP option (under Miscellaneous) and unchecked the box that says “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders”

3. Uploaded the images again.

Now they’re visible and I can see/edit/download them to my local machine via FTP.

(I did step 2 because the WP site in this case is a site with around 15 Pages, not being used as a blog yet, and probably won’t be — so I don’t need the structure to be created that way. Also, this step showed me that I could “see” the images and see that the change worked).

MAIN SOLUTION: make sure you use 777, not 707 for the permissions on the uploads directory in the wp-content folder.

I thought I’d post this in case another WP user with a virtual provider had the same problem (or am I the only silly user in the world who did that?!?!) and needed to find out the solution.

“Mea culpa” in this case, even though I’ve been a Pair customer for 9 years and an internet user for 12!