[wp-hackers] Installing themes, plugins without FTP

[Scot Hacker]

> From: Barry Carlyon <barry at barrycarlyon.co.uk>
> 
> Its because the Filesystem class, checks to see if it can write to WordPress root, not the folder its about to write stuff too :-(

Thanks for responses everyone. Though the suggestion above did not work, this does: In wp-config, add:

define('FS_METHOD', 'direct');

and make sure wp-content/themes and wp-content/plugins are writable by the web server. You do NOT need to change ownership of the document root, and these less permissive perms work fine for plugins and themes:

drwxrwxr-x   9 username nobody 4096 Mar 23 15:14 themes/
drwxrwxr-x   9 username nobody 4096 Mar 23 15:14 themes/

Before finding this, I tried adding FTP info to wp-config, but found it very slow, and it would be tedious to get FTP working for 100+ different users. This "direct" method is definitely the simplest solution.

It also gets the perms right so that  themes and plugins can be  edited and/or deleted from the Dashboard.

Thanks,
Scot