Sometimes, on some web hosts, after manually installing WordPress you can’t install new plugins, upgrade the ones you have installed or install new themes. Instead of installing the new plugin it will ask you for your FTP settings.

Searching for help will only give you a bunch of links that tell you to check your permissions but if your /wp-content already has 777 then why is it still broken?

getmyuid() has been disabled for security reasons

The answer is, most probably, the above heading as an invisible error. Your webhost has a misconfigured server or something – I’m not quite sure why this happens, the thing is it does.

This function, getmyuid(), prevents PHP and therefore WordPress from finding out which user ID is running WordPress. So WordPress assumes direct file system access is broken and therefore goes to FTP mode. Which is irritating.

I’ve sent in a workaround getmyuid() patch to the WordPress guys. We’ll see if they want to include it anytime.

Download the patch here

The file in question is /wp-admin/includes. Help yourselves to the patch or the complete file. My WordPress version is 2.9.1.

file.php.diff.zip

file.php.zip

Anything else I should know?

Just make sure you completely reset the ownership of all your wp-admin files before patching. Just in case that helps (although I’m sure you’ve probably tried everything before finding this page).