Running WordPress under SourceForge project web hosting service can be frustrating. It just doesn’t work as seamlessly as it WordPress normally does. When I first installed WordPress, the Akismet anti-spam plugin wouldn’t work (still doesn’t) because SourceForge doesn’t allow remote connections. Yesterday I wanted to include an image in a post only to find that I couldn’t upload an image due to a permissions problem.
It took a while to figure it out and with the reorganiztion of SourceForge, a lot of their documentation is either wrong or missing. SourceForge allows a “persistent” directory for uploads but it isn’t in the htdocs tree – it is in a different area of the file system. To get uploads working I had to create a uploads directory in the persistent file system space for my project and then create a symbolic link from wp-contents/uploads to the uploads directory in the persistent directory. Certainly not real striaight forward but at least it is now working. It shouldn’t be this hard. I did all of this with sftp, I couldn’t figure out a way to get a shell open via SSH.
While I was at it I also updated WordPress to the latest (2.6.2) version.