Cannot Import Content from remote WordPress site

  • Resolved TonyR63

    (@tonyr63)


    11 years, 5 months ago

    I installed wordpress 3.5.1 as per the instructions on my home Apache2 server as best I could considering all the instructions are written from the context of remote hosted installations. I initiallly had a local host issue which I resolved. I was subsequently unable to automatically upgrade to 3.5.2 I believe due to permissions issues as I got the FTP permission problems so I manually upgraded to get round this unexpected limitation.

    Now I find when I try to import content I downloaded from a remote WordPress site to the xml file I get prompted for FTP passwords like it has to install the import feature and I do not get a browse interface to select my xml file for import. Is this another permissions error and if so why have I been locked out for my own server environment when I installed WordPress to instructions? I was directly logged into my server when I downloaded and installed WordPress using my account that has full access to Linux accepting that I had to use sudo to copy the files. I have given myself full admin permission on the wordpress site using its admin interface so why can I not import data. There is nothing in the installation instructions about needing to change ownership of files or folders.

    To try to correct this I changed the owner of /var/www/wordpress/ from Root to www-data (my apache2 user) but this has made no difference. What permission should be set on each sub folder of wordpress?

    What do I need to do to be able to import data and how many other admin activities will I be prevented from doing due to permissions errors? I assumed that installation would prepare wordpress for use which has not happened in my case.

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  • Thread Starter TonyR63

    (@tonyr63)

    Update

    I reviewed the advise at https://www.chrisabernethy.com/why-wordpress-asks-connection-info/ as well as the feedback from many others experiencing the same problem who responded to the thread and found that I was still not able to install plugins even with the correct ownership set on the relevant folders.

    I run the chown -R command against wp-admin; wp-content/plugins and chmod -R 755 on wp-content/plugins and chmod -R a-w on wp-admin. It was only I edited the wp-config.php to include: – define(‘FS_METHOD’, ‘direct’) that the install proceeded but again with some errors – “could not create directory /var/www/wordpress/wp-content/upgrade” which I manually created and assigned www-data owner and also had to create an importers folder.

    This allowed the import tool installation to complete and I was able to import the xml from the recent remote wordpress export. However not all the content was properly imported with much of the multimedia content corrupt. When I have worked with the content owner and determined what has not imported properly I will open a new thread to examine possible deficiencies with the import tool.

    I believe the installation instructions for wordpress need to be reviewed because often on linux systems there is a difference between extracting a downloaded archive to its final intended destination on a server and extracting to an intermediate folder and subsequently copying it to its final destination in terms of the ownership and permissions that are set. The wordpress installation program should check and if required reassign ownership and permissions so that the admin features function as intended post installation. In Linux folder permissions are not inherited like ACL type permissions are in Windows.

    The core requirement of any installation script is always to make such environmental preparations for intended application function and in the case of wordpress it is significantly deficient. I think it is very misleading to reference the 5 minute install in the manner it does and for many quite unhelpful.

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