I’ve worked on a new blog entry today (which is about installation and setup of a develop and deployment environment for developers on MacBook, using OpenSolaris, VirtualBox, Glassfish, MySQL and Netbeans).

Wanted to add a screenshot to the post and got an error: Unable to create directory /www/htdocs/…./wp-content/uploads/2009/03. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

Searching the web I was first directed to check the settings:
using the Admin section of WordPress, go to Settings -> Miscellaneous and see if the first of the entries (called: “Store uploads in this folder“) on the resulting page is a full path or rather (as it should be) just reads  “wp-content/uploads”

However, for my installation this looked fine so I was wondering what was wrong. Further search revealed that WordPress expects high permission levels specifically for the wp-content directory. So to resolve the issue, this is what helps:

• using an ftp client, connect to your WordPress ftp directory
• select the “wp-content” directory and have it changed to 777 permissions (Read, Write and Execute set for Owner, Group and Others)
• make sure that you have the ftp-client apply this recursively to all sub-directories of wp-content
  (I first only did the change to wp-content itself and this is not sufficient)

Having done that change, media and other uploads work (or at least seem to work) smoothly now.