Shortcode and Cornerstone issues

[Weedobooty]

Hello.

I have installed Wordpress and the X theme on a cloud server. I have two problems that i think are related. First, my X theme shortcodes are not working. Googling for this issue, i came across a few threads where installing Cornerstone was the suggested solution. I’d rather not use Cornerston,e unless absolutely necessary, but i gave it a try. That gave me an error message: “Unable to install Cornerstone. Your WordPress file permissions do not allow plugins to be installed.”

The suggested solution to this is to change file- and directory permissions in the Wordpress installation file structure so that all folders have 755 (drwxr-xr-x) and all files have 644 (rw-r–r--) permissions. I have made this change but i still get the same error. Please help.

[marc_a]

Hi @Weedobooty,

Thanks for reaching out.

To better help you with your issues, please give us the following information in a Secure Note.

• WordPress Login URL
• Admin level username and password
• FTP access

You can find the Secure Note button at the bottom of your posts.

Thank you.

[nabeel]

Hey @Weedobooty,

Thank you for providing the credentials. Cornerstone is a required plugin, it needs to be installed to make the theme work correctly. I checked your site and you’re having the file permission issue, this is usually a host related issue.

First you can try resetting your WordPress files and folders permissions yourself. The correct settings can be found at http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2014/05/08/proper-wordpress-filesystem-permissions-ownerships/. If this doesn’t help then try contacting your webhost regarding this issue.

Hope this helps!

[Weedobooty]

I am hosting this server myself and, as stated in my original post, i have already set file- and directory permissions to the recommended settings.

[prakash_s]

Hello @Weedobooty

I checked your website dashboard it seems that for some reason the WordPress system can’t write to your /wp-content folder directly and WordPress is having a conflict with permissions and ownerships.
To get rid of this issue please add this code define('FS_METHOD','direct'); in wp-config.php file.
After adding this code into your wp-confing.php file, try to install the Cornerstone plugin.

You can access the wp-config.php file through FTP. It would be in the root directory if your WordPress installation.

Hope it helps
Thanks

[Weedobooty]

Thank you, Prakash.

This seems to have solved the issue. Being a programmer, i’m very curious to know why this was required. I might be able to figure that out by googlng.

[nabeel]

Hey @Weedobooty,

According to WordPress’s official documentation:

FS_METHOD forces the filesystem method. It should only be “direct”, “ssh2”, “ftpext”, or “ftpsockets”. Generally, you should only change this if you are experiencing update problems. If you change it and it doesn’t help, change it back/remove it. Under most circumstances, setting it to ‘ftpsockets’ will work if the automatically chosen method does not.

To learn more please see https://wordpress.org/support/article/editing-wp-config-php/#wordpress-upgrade-constants

Cheers!