Are you always required to input FTP Connection Information for WordPress Plugin Upgrades and WordPress upgrades? WordPress has made it actually a one click process, but still many bloggers are stuck with this.
We too have been experiencing this FTP Connection Information required alert everytime we want to upgrade WordPress or upgrade WordPress plugins or install WordPress plugins. And for some strange reason, even after entering the correct information, it would often simply time out. We had to do manual FTP upgrades everytime.
WordPress FTP Connection Information
But as I started to plan a few new sites on Hostgator, I realized how simple and efficiently WordPress one click upgrades work there. I realized it was some hosting related issue, and was a lot to do with WordPress file permissions and file ownership – so we contacted our excellent Knownhost VPS hosting, and as usual their excellent knowledgeable support had the answers.
PHP on your server is running as DSO and hence the plugin installations or wordpress upgrade will be one under the apache user and this is why you will have to correct the permissions each time you are installing plugins. To resolve the issue completely, suPHP should be enabled on the server. If suPHP is enabled on the server then the PHP scripts will be running under the ownership of the account user. So the php scripts will create the directories/files with the account ownership.
Well so they did a recompilation of Apache/PHP and enabled suPHP on the server. It took 1 hour, there was no downtime and the FTP Connection Information Errors were gone forever and WordPress one click installs and upgrades were working just fine. Now you can fix it too.