I put a PunBB forum on my website here - then made the mistake of trying to put another database for another forum on my host space. Chaos ruled. I discovered that PunBB forums interfere with each other if on the same space so I moved the new one and someone helped me sort out the mix ups - but now I can't access the admin board to change settings on the original forum. I get a message

please make sure PHP has write access to the directory cache

do you know what this means and what I should do?

You can have two lots of forum tables on one database provided you change the table prefix to identify which is which.

A Google Search gets this

The forum software seems to use a directory to cache some pages generated.
Try to look in the installation notes if you can spot it.

And in the future, use a transaction when you do something "dangerous." This way you can commit if everything works, or roll back when chaos reigns.

thank you - I'm out of my depth here but I'm wandering around in phpbuilder trying to understand your answers!

Found it! Thanks all.

Hi, remember this message? Sorry, I'm a slow learner. Now the same thing has happened on my other site, here I get the message 'please make sure PHP has write access to the directory cache' when I try to access the forum page... and I can't remember where to find the file that lists write access. Please can someone give me a clue?

Originally Posted by Kay G

'please make sure PHP has write access to the directory cache'

I think you just need to adjust the directory permissions for that directory (i.e. cache).

You should be able to do so via FTP. 6 stands for "read and write" on a Linux based system; you can find full details here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_system_permissions

If you're still stuck - let us know what FTP client you're using and what the cache directory is currently set to.

Thank you. What do you mean by which client? I've got Windows XP on my system, the database is on Supanames hosting and I'm uploading to it via SamrtFTP. I confess I shovelled all the files for the forum onto it without really understanding them all. There is a file called cache.php is that what we're talking about? It includes this:

Output ban list as PHP code
$fh = @fopen(PUN_ROOT.'cache/cache_bans.php', 'wb');
if (!$fh)
error('Unable to write bans cache file to cache directory. Please make sure PHP has write access to the directory \'cache\'', __FILE__, __LINE__);

fwrite($fh, '<?php'."\n\n".


...which is presumably what created the error message I'm getting.

No - not talking about the file cache.php - there's a directory (folder) called cache PHP that you'll find in your hosting space.

Take a look here: http://www.siteground.com/tutorials/ftp/ftp_chmod.htm

You need to set the 'write' permission so that the web server (PHP) has access to write new files to the cache directory.

Login to your hosting space via FTP and right-click on the cache directory, select Properties / CHMOD as shown in the screenshot on that link above...

Should hopefully be obvious from there. However, you only need to do this for the directory itself - not for "subfolders and files" - so no need to have that option ticked..

I should add that the 'write' option is available for 3 different "levels" (assuming a Linux hosting server):

User / Group / Others

In many cases, PHP runs as a completely separate user on the system to your own FTP user. This means that the setting for User (first number) has no relevance here and should be left alone... you probably need to change "Others" to have "write" permission - but please try changing "Group" first if this doesn't already have "write" permission.

You want to ensure that this permission is as limited as possible, and setting "others" to "write" potentially allows anyone to write to this directory (i.e. including other users on the same server at your web host). If it works with "group" set to "write", this restricts to other users in the same group only (depends on your host's configuration as to what users this actually includes).

Hmm, I found that - thanks for the excellent directions! But it hasn't made any difference.

What are the permissions set on the cache directory at the moment?

The same as the screenshot you showed in the link above - Users/Group/others for Read, Write and Execute checked UID GIP and Sticky unchecked - but I tried all combinations of the write permissions with no change.

From my understanding of the error message, it sounds like there's a config. file that it's trying to write to - maybe that already exists rather than needing to create it, and therefore the permissions error is on that file?

I'm guessing (on the basis of the PHP you posted earlier) that it would be called cache_configuration.php perhaps? Check if that file exists in the cache directory, and if it does then try making that writable.

If it doesn't exist - perhaps provide a listing of the files in the cache directory (but don't post a list of hundreds of files!! - not without using the [ code ] tag or something anyway!).

I've got config.php - it is already checked as writable. I've tried giving write permissions on all the php files I can find ... no change.

Based on the information in this thread on the punBB forums, I think you may be able to fix this by deleting everything in the cache directory.

Give that a try (at your own risk!), and if that doesn't fix it I'd recommend your best place for more help on this may be the punBB forums (link above) as obviously people around there actually have some experience with it

Thank you.

Originally Posted by damien_ls

No - not talking about the file cache.php - there's a directory (folder) called cache PHP that you'll find in your hosting space.

Can you tell me where to look for this?

Well it's changed - I now get 'Firefox can't find the server at www.eflorum.co.uk' - it can find all the other pages of the site.

Did you delete ALL files - or just files within the cache directory?