If you’re like me, and you deal with installing or setting up wordpress sites, you’ve probably encountered this annoying error…
Here’s how I fixed it:
1. Log on to FTP site with FileZilla
2. Navigate to the root wordpress folder
3. Right-click the wp-content/plugins folder and make sure it has 755 permissions
4. Then, highlight all the plugins folders, right-click and make sure they have 664 permissions (apply to subfolders)
5. Go back to wordpress dashboard, and you should be good to go 🙂
For those truly geeky, here are the command line versions of the above, after you SSH to your server:
cd worpress/wp-content
chmod 0755 plugins
cd plugins
chmod -R 0664 *
P.S. – actually, after implementing this change, automatic upgrade of plugins started working too. Whereas before they would start the download and stop there, now they actually complete successfully. The only thing I had to do different was use 774 instead of 664 for the folders under the plugins folder (at least for the wordpress mu installation on which I tried this).