“The uploaded file could not be moved to…” Familiar? Well, there are many reasons why this vague error gets triggered in Wordpress. I know this now because I’ve spent the past five hours scouring the web looking for a solution!

The first thing to check is that the permissions for the destination directory are correct - the website has to be able to write to the folder. But that’s simple. If you’re still having problems, and you’re site is hosted by an ISP and you don’t have access to PHP settings - before you do anything else, ask them to check and see if the upload_tmp_dir is configured correctly for your server. Turns out mine wasn’t, and I wish I had known this was something to check before I tried the other ten thousand work-arounds.

If the temp directory isn’t configured right, the server has nowhere to upload the file to before it copies it to its final destination. And so technically, the error message makes sense. It’s not helpful or informative, but…

Anyway, hope it helps. Remember - check the upload_tmp_dir!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 16th, 2008 at 2:01 am and is filed under Tutorial, Wordpress. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.