A shortcut to avoid

When the time came to install WordPress on my Mac OS X Server, my local machine was busy processing some large log files from a client, so being impatient, I connected to the server using VNC to do the install “directly” on the server.

I popped open Safari, downloaded WordPress, dragged the resulting folder to the home directory of the virtual user account, and set up MySQL.

As detailed below, it seemed to run fine, so I figured everything was fine.

Nope.

Yesterday it occurred to me that a WordPress install would be perfect for a subsection of that site, so I chucked in some data and started trying to edit the template files and add widgets.

What a mess. The file ownerships and permissions were all off, and even after going through the file hierarchy with chown and chmod, the site still wasn’t running the way I wanted it to.

So, I scrapped and reordered. I deleted (via VNC, of course, because I didn’t have authority to delete the files using Fetch) everything except wp-config.php, and the uploaded fresh WordPress files via FTP to the virtual user account. A little editing of the template files to clean up the presentation, and I was done.

So, the moral is to upload WordPress to Mac OS X Server via your virtual user’s FTP account, even though it seems faster and easier to do it “directly” using VNC.