CODEWITHSUNDEEP
wordpress
Lehel
Lehel

Reputation: 99

Wordpress plugins not appearing in admin

I am using Ubuntu and installed wordpress via:

sudo apt-get install wordpress

This installed wordpress to /usr/share/wordpress. When I go to the admin and view installed plugins, Akismet plugin displays. But if I download a plugin and place it in /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins directory (even after trying chmod 777 plugin-dir), the plugin doesn't show in the admin. If I remove the Akismet plugin, it disappears from the admin and reappears after replacing it. So, not sure why that default plugin is being found in the wp-content/plugins directory yet no other plugin seems to work.

Edit

Only plugin files that are inside the directory wp-content/plugins/akismet are notice by the wordpress installation. Why would that be? How can I fix that?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 913

Answers (1)

logc
logc

Reputation: 3923

This is nicely explained in a document that is installed with the same Debian package: /usr/share/doc/wordpress/README.Debian.gz

In short, most Wordpress sources are installed to /usr/share/wordpress, belonging to root, but by default Wordpress is configured to look for content under /var/lib/wordpress. That directory tree should be owned by your web server's user (usually, apache for Apache, www-data for Nginx).

$ sudo chown -R /var/lib/wordpress

Notice that core plugins and themes are symlinked from /var/lib/wordpress to /usr/share/wordpress, so they actually are under ownership of root.

Akismet is one of those core plugins; it is installed as a symlink.

$ ls /var/lib/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/
akismet -> /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins/akismet/

That is why other plugins are only found after moving them into the same folder: they are found by the Wordpress installation through the symlink.

Do not install plugins under /usr/share/wordpress/wp-content/plugins, but under /var/lib/wordpress/wp-content/plugins.

Upvotes: 0

Related Questions