chuck

Sorry, I should clarify that last post, so it’s a little more helpful to anyone else who might encounter the same problem:
Any files that the webserver (including PHP, CGI and any other webform)
will write to or modify must:
– be 644 (and directories 755), if you know the USER that the webserver runs as, and you must also change the ownership on the files/directories to that same user. For apache, this is usually “nobody”, “apache” or “www”, depending on how it’s been set up.
– be 664 (and directories 775), if you know the GROUP that the webserver runs as, and you must also change the group ownership on the files/directories to that same group. This is usually the same as the username. For example, when I ftp into my wife’s weblog site, I see the following:
230-User <username> has group access to: <username>
I hadn’t expected the wp-config.php file to need writing to, so I had set it to 644, but decided to change it to 664 just in case. And that worked. Anyway…
– be 666 (and directories 777), if you either don’t know the user/group of the webserver, or you don’t have permission to change the file/directory permissions to their ownership. Note that this means anyone with access to this website, either through login or a badly-written PHP script, can overwrite these files and directories, which is bad.

Hmm… it appears all I had to do was change the perms on wp-config.php from 644 to 664 and voilà — it worked. The blog is now set up.