Persistent themes

I guess my first suggestion would be to find another hosting company because I hate NSI for both technical and political reasons.

Plan B might be to figure out why your first shot at installing didn’t work. It’s probably something lame NSI is doing, but maybe not.

Plan C, assuming it’s not some Windoze server, is get to a command prompt. The first thing I do with an FTP-only account is to upload PHP Shell (you can get it from https://phpshell.sourceforge.net/). It’s not quite the same as having a true shell prompt, but it’s close. Follow the directions to make sure it’s fairly secure and delete it when you are done.

Once you have it up, cd into the wp-content/themes directory and try doing rm -rf theme-name for each theme you want to get rid of. If this doesn’t work then it’s almost certainly something squirrely that NSI is doing.

There a bunch of good, cheap hosting companies out there — GatorHost, 1and1.com, webfaction, etc. There’s no reason to waste your time with NSI.

Thanks Hedronist

It is a Linux host. Unfortunately I don’t think we can move her site for many reasons. I am well pissed at NS because it took them days to answer me and then it was to say we don’t support WordPress, and I should refer to WP for help. Well I can see no one else has had these problems. Now I see at the root of her site and in her WP folders she has a file, .htaccess which contains this script:

# BEGIN WordPress
<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /english/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteRule . /english/index.php [L]
</IfModule>

# END WordPress

I’m wondering if this is the culprit! I was looking at the folders in the installation and they have root as owner and the chmod does not allow modification!
As for the first install not working I know that NS actually blocked it which is amazing!

But what do you think of this .htaccess file? I know I had problems with them before!

Thanks VM

Ah … “root as owner”. That is definitely a part of your problem. That alone is enough for me to say again, find another hosting company, one that doesn’t think of customers as vermin to be tolerated while their checks clear the bank. Even if she has pre-paid, chalk it up as tuition in the University of Hard Knocks and move on.

The .htaccess file could be causing your problem, maybe. Is you WP install in a subdir called ‘english’? If not, then this definitely is part of the problem.

Thanks hedronist

I sorted it. See the main problem was that their shell had had some kind of a freak out and made all of the internally installed components of WP in root permissions. I have tried resetting the permissions several times and it simply did not accept the command, not even messing directly with chmod for each file and still returned error. Their own overall reset permissions also returned error messages.

Finally though I logged, cleared their cookies, cleared caches, quit browser and logged back in and hey presto I reset permissions site wide and dumped the persistent files.

For now at any rate all the permissions are returned to me!

Thanks for everything. VM