As reported in the last post. I failed to install Elgg yesterday at http://terrywassall.org/elgg/. Since that post I tried to fix things by messing about with some of the settings and now I can’t log in! I shall be going for the equivalent of the ‘turn it off and on’ PC fix and so a complete reinstall ans start again.

Before that though I have tried another install in a subdomain of another web site I have – in elgg.terrywassall.net. This time I set up all the folder permissions so that the Elgg install script could create the necessary settings and configuration files automatically. This worked fine and all I had to do was fill in the database info and the path to the /data/ folder I had created. This is where things went wrong. The /data/ directory has to be created outside of the install path, i.e. in this case not in /httpdocs/, the document root of the subdomain. However, I found I did not have permissions to create folders at the same level as /httpdocs/. So I created it in /httpdocs/ and hoped for the best. I understand that you shouldn’t do this for security reasons. When I had filled in all the details required in the system settings form and clicked save I got an error message saying that the /data/ directory must be outside the installation path and that was that. I have now contacted my ISP and asked them to either give me permissions or to create the /data/ directory for me.