So I’ve been halfheartedly trying to setup a new Wordpress installation for a client that I subcontract for and I kept running into permissions errors when trying to update the Wordpress installation and plugins from inside Wordpress.

I generally just upload a customized folder set that has the same themes I use on all installations and the basic plugins I setup for all of my clients.  I thought that somehow, Filezilla might have done something strange while uploading this folder set.

Figuring that since it was a new site and it would take more time to track this crap down then it was worth, I just re-uploaded a fresh Wordpress installation (keeping the old wp-config.php to save time).

The fresh Wordpress installation I had locally was outdated so the first thing I did was an automatic update inside of the Wordpress Admin area.  This went without issue.  Next I decided to install the plugins…. I waited, and waited, and then waited some more until finally I get hit with:

Could not copy file /public_html/blog/wp-content/upgrade/all-in-one-seo-pack/all-in-one-seo-pack/all_in_one_seo_pack-bg_BG.mo

No worries… I’ll just plug the error into The Goolges and see what comes of it.  At first I search on the entire error… which is kind of newbish, but for the extra 10 seconds it takes – I’ll search specific first before searching more general.

So, as expected – being specific yeilds no results

That’s ok… time for a more general search.  This time I search for:

Could not copy file /public_html/blog/wp-content/upgrade/

This end’s up giving me over 1,500 results… there’s bound to be something useful in there somewhere… So I check out the first link given to me by the all mighty, all knowing Google and I actually get some useful information… even though I have to scroll down a bit (It was a Wordpress Support Topic).

The end result that finally allowed me to install and update new plugins:

1. Login to the end client’s ftp account
2. Delete the /wp-content/upgrade/ directory
3. Create a new upgrade directory with nothing in it
4. Assign 755 permissions to the folder – If you don’t know what this means… you shouldn’t be charging people for websites.