WordPress management

Hello everyone

Today’s topic is a bit different than usual but to make sure that I remember this small fix I decided to write a small blog post about it. I run a number of WordPress installations for various people and recently I setup a new one on a web server behind a very nasty firewall. This firewall is blocking passive FTP connections so when trying to automatically update plugins and such requiring FTP in WordPress I was hitting a wall that after entering credentials the page would just hang at “loading”. I think a spent about an hour debugging what was going on. Nothing in web server logs, login was successful in FTP server logs. What was going on?

Then it struck me! The FTP server did not allow passive FTP connections to upload, they could connect but not upload. So was WordPress using passive FTP?

Turns out, yes it does. And it is hard-coded. Not very nice WordPress! Following this post: http://wordpress.org/support/topic/define-ftp-active-mode-in-wp-config I found the file:

includes/class-wp-filesystem-ftpext.php

and it indeed containged the line:

@ftp_pasv( $this->link, true );

which hard-codes the use of passive FTP. Now changing it to false solved my problem! It would be nice if this setting could be set via wp-config.php as other FTP options can.