Themes missing in Admin Panel

I found the cause and the fix (with lots of help from dalkinn’s notes above — thanks dalkinn for posting your followup)

I’m assuming the yum install is like the debian install which does something like this:

The local wp-config.php file for the blog is a symlink to /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php which makes it easier to host multiple WP blogs on the same server. The contents of the /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php looks like this:

require_once('/etc/wordpress/config-'.strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).'.php');
define('ABSPATH', '/usr/share/wordpress/');
require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php');

The WP themes are not listed in the design gallery if they are not installed under the ABSPATH, but for that to work the ABSPATH also has to be same as the DocumentRoot path in the Apache conf of that host. So I edited the ABSPATH in /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php file like so:

require_once('/etc/wordpress/config-'.strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).'.php');
define('ABSPATH', '/var/www/'.strtolower($_SERVER['HTTP_HOST']).'/');
require_once(ABSPATH.'wp-settings.php');

…and lo’ behold the themes now appear in the design themes gallery.

Note that for consistency sake I install each WP blog under /var/www/host.domain.com where “host.domain.com” is also the actual address of the blog as well as the name of its /etc/wordpress/config- file. This setup makes it easier to have multiple blogs on same server.

Thanks very much as well for this post; after a weekend of frustration, I was able to use dumbusername’s wp-config file above to realize I had to modify my own wp-config file, which is not in any of the dozens of tutorials around the net on WordPress installations.

Apparently, when you install WordPress using Synaptic, the wordpress directory is put under /usr/share instead of /var/www where all the tutorials and WordPress instructions say it should go. On my Hardy install, this caused an error message when the scripts in the /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php file were run. The /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php file was looking for wp-settings.php in the wrong place, and so by changing the line in the /etc/wordpress/wp-config.php to (‘ABSPATH’, ‘/usr/share/wordpress/’);, I’m up and running.

Of course you all knew that; this comment to help out others who may have a similar problem.

Thanks again.

Rick Bryan
New York, NY

Indeed, thanks for the followup and solution had I proceeded along the way I did, dumbusername.

With that, I now understand why it is set up the way it was, though I certainly wouldn’t have guessed as such. On my server, I just run the one website/blog so the yum installation method just ended up complicating things. Next time I’ll just download and unzip!