ColdForged

Oddly, the suggestions that you just listed are the right route to go. Verify you have all of the things correct.

Then again, maybe not… after further reading it appears it “works with caveats”.

Alrighty, go here, download that code to a file and upload it to your wp-plugins directory with your FTP client and save it as “chmod-hack.php”. Activate it in the Plugins menu.

Using your FTP client you should be able to delete those plugin files now… the plugin changed the permissions of all files in the plugins directory to 777. Bear in mind, that’s unsafe. So, click on the Plugins menu again. Every time you click on the Plugins menu while that plugin is active it will toggle the permissions of all the files in the wp-content/plugins directory between 0777 and 0755. So, when you’re done deleting plugins, click on the Plugins menu and then double-check from within your FTP client that the files have the correct (0755) permission. Then, deactivate the “Chmod Hack” plugin again until you next need it.

Unfortunately it’s a techy situation. Let me see what I can come up with.

Ah. But it’s only printing it once? That’s interesting, there’d have to be more than one if you’ve got 2 echos. Make sure you have echos in all conditional paths in the admin.php file, and make sure you cna tell the echos apart (e.g. echo "1. $page_hook"; for one and echo "2. $page_hook"; for another).

but i am wondering why WP does not have this feature

Primarily because if WordPress had every feature that everyone might possibly desire it would be roughly the size and maintainability of Windows XP.

Precisely.

Tricky. About the only recourse I can think of — and this is pretty hacky, admittedly — is create a new template and insert some PHP code in that template to chown all the files in your wp-content/plugins directory to your UID. That way you can deal with them again.

The problem with the WPPM is that, as you’ve found, in some environments the files installed are owned by the UID of the Apache process, not your FTP UID. Hence, the FTP UID doesn’t have permission to due jack to it. So, you have to again rely on the Apache UID under the guise of some PHP code to change the owner of the file back to you.