Ignore the above post about having a Wordpress Site that is unable to use plugins. Admitted, this tutorial does assume a lot (if you know nothing about Ubuntu). Fortunately, I know everything about Ubuntu and if you did follow this tutorial and WERE able to install Ubuntu, everything will work. The author of the post didn’t know enough about Ubuntu, got frustrated, and made his post hoping to either denigrate the author, the tutorial, or both. If he would had read the tutorial a couple more times he might have figured out it was a simple path or permission issue. Those who knew Ubuntu immediately noticed this issue and fixed it on the fly, as it was knowledge he/she had taken for granted through their years of use with Ubuntu.
Plugins work just fine. Make sure you do the ‘chown -R www-data:www-data /usr/share/wordpress’. Yes that line is different than what’s in the tutorial. It is simply a more complete way to set permissions. Chances are that setting the user ownership will be enough, however, in some instances you MAY need the group ownership to be properly set. If not, then you might complain plugins don’t work.
The other possible issue you might have while using this tutorial (with some admitted assumptions) is the issue of pointing the wordpress symlink at /var/www as opposed to pointing at /var/www/html. This unfortunately is another one of those possible assumpition things.
Finally, there was some droning on about /blog not being a directory in the Unix file system. That is correct, if you followed through the tutorial you will know at no time is the a creation of some directory name ‘blog’. This is a symbolic name that is used in the configuration file. It may or MAY NOT actually exist as a directory in your file system.
It’s just a matter of how much you know or don’t know. But just because something doesn’t work because you thought you followed instructions to the ‘t’ probably has more to do with your lack of knowledge of the overall subject.
This guide was not called a comprehensive guide. But I can guarantee you anyone who has used/administered a Ubuntu box for at least a year will have easily set their WordPress site up with the aid of these instructions supplemented by their knowledge of their own system.
I do help with this stuff, but unfortunately for most, I do it professionally on a pay basis, have Ubuntu servers up on the internet now you can peruse (i have a publicly available ubuntu shell server for responsible people) and look at active production servers and how they are configured. Contact me personally if you would like to know more.
The guy who wrote the tutorial needs to be thanked for all the time and effort he put into it. It has helped thousands of people get working sites. Just because 1 guy couldnt figure out how to do something has more to do with that one guy than it does this tutorial.
I’m such a softee. I just can’t help sticking up for people.
Ron