Missing Themes and Plugins

Here’s a little tip for anyone running a PHP site. If you mess around with folder read/write permissions, you might suddenly disable your site. Apparently, PHP doesn’t “like” certain folders to have too many permissions. For instance, you might lose the ability to add, edit, and remove plugins or themes if you set the permissions too high on the wp-content folder in a Wordpress installation.

Instead of the various editing options, here’s what you might see on the themes panel in your Wordpress control page

“All of this theme’s files are located in .”

And, no themes. Something similar shows up in the plugins page in such a case.

The cure is simple. Change the permissions (using CHMOD in your FTP manager or CPanel) for your wp-content folder to a maximum setting of 755. I.e. if it was 766, then that’s too high and you’ll run into trouble on a dynamic system like Wordpress.