memacI am either having a file permission problem or an "I'm ignorant" problem, and I'll be humble and wait to see which it is. I admit I am not very knowledgeable about WordPress yet. I'll try to keep this posting short, but I might not succeed, given all the facts.
I am using a hosted WordPress installation on Network Solutions. I used their installer, which gave me no choices except those involving a administrator name/email/password and what directory the installation would be housed in.
The new blog site does display alright, including the sample "hello world" post.
Now, I plan to use this blog for my business, so I wanted to customize the page a bit, most importantly, I want to put my company's logo at the top - replacing the default "colored blocks" logo.
I choose Atahualpa as the theme, then went into the Atahualpa theme options area. I changed the logo name to the name of the logo file I have, then I knew the next step would be to actually get my logo file into the expected location. I didn't see any front-end supported way of transferring a file to the right location (I determined the "right location" by looking at the HTML source code on my blog page and seeing where the default logo was stored - ...blog1/wp-content/themes/atahualpa/images/).
Not finding anything in the administrative menus or knowing about how to transfer administrative files in (although I see some people establish an uploads directory for files they put in their actual blog entries), I decided just to FTP the file to where it belonged.
Note: My website is also hosted by Network Solutions, and I have successfully FTPd files to my website before. My WordPress installation is nestled in with some of the same directories for my regular website.
When I tried to push the logo file to ...blog1/wp-content/themes/atahualpa/images/, I got a permission error.
I called Network Solutions to ask if it was expected that I couldn't FTP to this directory, since I owned it (or sort of own it). The helper tried to temporarily chmod the directory to a more permissive setting. She didn't succeed. I do not believe I can chmod it either.
Her suggestions were (a) change the "whole server's" permissions (which apparently is htdocs on down, recursively) to "default permissions". My regular website uses htdocs, so I'm not enthusiastic about this option, especially since she couldn't tell me what "default options" meant. The other option, (b) was to remove the WordPress installation and re-install, which I thought was silly because I just installed last night using THEIR installation process, and she didn't have any good reason to believe the process would produce any different results this time than last. (I later did try reinstalling, and had the same problem.)
Could she tell me if the same owner owned the regular website files, also owns the WordPress files? No, she can't tell me that.
Could I talk to a UNIX system administrator? No.
Could I talk to her manager? No, because the manager would just tell me the same thing.
Could she tell me how I might expect to get my blog working at this rate? No.
She did, however, say that their installations "worked out of the box".
Great.
Using a GUI FTP tool, I saw more information. My regular web site files are owned by a six-digit owner UID. From blog1 on down is owned by UID 0. That's root, I believe. File permission on the images directory is rwxr-sr-x. (That 's' might be significant - but it has been too long since I learned about sticky bits for me to remember what they do.)
I do not have command line access.
My question:
Sounds like Network Solutions front-line helpers are unable to chmod the directory, even just for a minute so I can get the file placed. So I guess I can't FTP to that directory. Other directories seem to have similar permission settings.
I've looked up some forum listings about how to change header files, and the answer was to FTP files into the appropriate directory, so I don't think I was crazy to try to FTP to fix my issue.
So, am I missing something big here? Is there some intermediary software/menu option/something/anything that will let me get a file into this directory, that I should have been using to start with? Or is the underlying file permission something I can't get around?
Thanks for whatever help you can offer.
