Having come to a full stop on the Elgg installation until I can track down information on my avatar and file upload problem, I thought I would continue exploring WPMU. As we now have a successful BuddyPress installation at work now I have decided to copy what our tech team and users are doing there and add BuddyPress to http://terrywassall.org/blogs and take advantage of expertise and information they are gaining. The installation went fine and nothing reeally to report. I basically followed the instructions at http://wpmu.org/beginners-guide-to-buddypress/. I also activated the bbPress installation for forums. Every thing went well until I tried to upload a new avatar, for the admin account and for a user. In both cases I got the message:

Upload Failed! Error was: Unable to create directory /var/www/vhosts/terrywassall.org/httpdocs/blogs/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files/avatars/3. Is its parent directory writable by the server?

I tried creating the directory path manually on the server and gave everything in the path 777 permissions and I did manage to upload a new avatar for the user but when tried to do it for admin I got a message saying the file could not be uploaded. I have reset all the default avatars and deleted the folders I created manually so back to square one for the moment. I had to make a copy of the blogs.dir folder as I couldn’t open it or change permissions – it belongs to apache it seems.  I renamed the original and have now reinstated that so it is exactly like the original installation again.

In addition, probably the same problem, on trying to upload a pdf file (a permitted file type for uploading) it looked as if it was uploading with a percentage cout down but then failed with the message:

Unable to create directory /var/www/vhosts/terrywassall.org/httpdocs/blogs/wp-content/blogs.dir/1/files. Is its parent directory writable by the server?