Permission failure when installing new theme

Hello,

The problem is because your wp-content directory is not writable by user running php most of the time its apache, please set write permission to apache user or group so that php can write or create folder for you.

This might look complicated to you so there is a relatively easy way ?? directly extract the theme into the wordpress > wp-content > themes folder with help of any ftp client like filezilla and later activate it from admin panel, Appearance > Themes ??

Hope this will solve your problem.

Thanks.

Thanks for your reply, but if I look at the properties of wp-content, I see its owner is charles, but “Others” can “Create and delete files” so I can’t see what is wrong.
With regards to your alternative suggestion, I have now created a new directory inside wp-content/themes but can see no way in the dashboard (4.5.3) to “Activate” it. How do I do this last step please?
While I am grateful for your help in specifying a work-around, I still maintain the WP-core should provide more information at the time of error, for example what directory is being created, and if possible what the current user is.

, I still maintain the WP-core should provide more information at the time of error, for example what directory is being created, and if possible what the current user is.

It usually would (were it the actual problem). The error would read something like: “Unable to create directory /var/www/xxx/domain/httpdocs/wp-content/uploads/year/month. Is its parent directory writable by the server?” – or something to that effect.

You have another issue that isn’t necessarily a WordPress specific problem. What do your server error logs tell you?

As you said you created a new directory inside the wp-content/themes (extracted the themes zip file there), now you need to go to the “Appearance” section inside the themes (wp-admin/themes.php) you see the theme name you extracted in the themes directory, when you mouse over on that theme you see at the bottom right corner a button named “Activate” by pressing this button the theme will be activated if everything is ok.

Thanks.