Neil's Open Source & Linux Blog

[UPDATED] Joomla 1.5 is acting flaky on one of our installations because the directories are set to ‘unwriteable’. To see the their current state, log in as Super Administrator and go to Help > System Info > Directory Permissions . Elsewhere, it's been suggested that the specified directories must be set to “world-writeable” (777). This works, but it is a very bad idea , since it means anyone can change your files! Not cool. Fixing Security with User and Group Settings To perform these changes, you need shell (command line) access to your server. If you don't have it, you can beg your host to make these changes for you, or switch to a Joomla-friendly host. I'm going to assume that you are using a LAMP (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP) server because if you're not, then ... well, these instructions should work in principle, but the specifics for your server may be quite different. Here's the issue: you, the FTP user, need full access to your files. So does Joomla,...

At Cadent , we use Parallels Plesk Control Panel Software for Hosting on our servers (we’ve also used the open source Webmin and the commercial CPanel). Plesk has a great user interface, which our clients appreciate. It also imposes its own way of doing things, which can be a bit of a pain when tracking down subtle issues with server configuration. Because Plesk rewrites many configuration files automatically, it’s really critical to ensure that I make any manual changes to the server configuration in the right place, or Plesk will overwrite my efforts without remorse. The issue we needed to address was this: we installed Joomla! 1.0 on our development server, and Joomla reported the following configuration problems:         •        Safe mode was on, needs to be off.         •        The session directory was unwriteable. PHP: Safe Mode is a global setting allows only a file's owner or group to execute the script or read a file. Clearly, this is a good thing for security...