My automatic upgrade plugin failed.
Everything went smooth up until "maintenance mode"
ERROR: could not put the site into maintenance mode.

they referred me to a forum post (wpau).

It suggests to "change all folder permissions to 777",then run the
plugin, when done.....change file permissions to 644.

WOW......does this make sense to anyone?

Thanks,

David

I'm not terribly familiar with this sort of problem, but as no-one else has jumped in yet I'll try to help a bit.

The forum post is suggesting that WordPress doesn't have permission to update the plugin.

Why...?

The files on your server are owned by someone (presumably you). As the owner, you can assign different privileges to yourself, people in the same group as the file and everyone else. These privileges are defined through numbers: the first digit stipulates the owner's rights, the second the group and the third everyone else. So changing permissions to 644 gives you 6 and everyone else 4.

So what's 6 mean, then?

There are 3 basic privileges:

- 4 read
- 2 write
- 1 execute

And these are additive, so 6 = permission to read and write, 7 = permission to read, write & execute.

And Wordpress...?

When WordPress runs stuff on your server, it will do so as a user in the everone else category. So if your files have permissions 644, WordPress will be able to read them (which is kinda necessary), but not write to or execute them (which is mostly good for security).

But when updating a plugin WordPress will need to write stuff to your plugins folder, so you will need to change the permissions for this folder to at least 666.

How do I do that?

You can change permissions using most FTP clients. There's a guide covering several here, or google chmod ftp for others.

Alternatively you can upgrade the plugin manually via FTP.

If you're interested, here's some more on chmod.

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Thankyou Meloncholy for this info.
David