The error on upgrading might be a hint although I would need to check that with my colleagues here. This is WordPress code that performs the updating of components and that suggests there may be some sort of read/write restriction. Which may also explain the lack of styling being loaded.

Two things to look at if you will.

Go to the forum admin > Integration > Storage Locations to see if all the required folders have a status of both found and writable. If any do not then that will need to be corrected and is almost certainly a matter of permissions.

Also go to the forum admin > Options > Global Settings. Over on the right you will find a section with two options to combine and compress CSS and Javascript. Please turn both of them off and update.

See what we get after that

Thanks for responding

All of the folders have permission 755. some of the files are 644. What do they need to be?

The theme update gave the same error after turning off those options.

The other installed plugins are as follows, in case these may conflict.

Formidable

Gallery

jQuery Vertical accordian Menu

MiniMU

Pagemash

Polldaddy

Share buttttons by Lockerz

Tiny MCE advanced

User access manager

User role editor

Oh yes forgot to say – all storage locations found, all write denied.

In cpanel I tried changing permissions to 777. they seemed to change but when I went back to the folder, they had reverted to 755.

Also it seems if I change the wp-content folder itself to 777, I lose formatting of the site itself.

Sometimes we come across servers set to ignore requests to files with a permissions of 777 so that is no surprise.

Every now and then – and it is rare but it does happen – folders are not created with the correct UID/GID values. Again – this will be a function of the way the server is set up but it does crop up from time to time. If you do not know what these are then basically they are the ‘owner’ IDs of the folder. Under normal conditions this owner would equate to the website but some servers will not allow this.

If these values have been set incorrectly it would explain the issues and the next step is to check them. Generally speaking a good FTP client will allow for this but the File Manager component of most hosting control panels will do a better job and might even allow you to change them. basically you need to check the UID and GID values for the ‘wp-content’ folder and then make sure that any sub-folders have the same values. I am guessing that they do not.

An alternative and perhaps easier plan would be to ask your hosting support to investigate that and make any corrections if required.

I’m not 100% sure what you mean by UID and GID but in filezilla most files have owner and group both set to aumensa.

For sp_resources these are 99 and 99 as are all its subdirectories.

There are some other folders in plugins that are also 99 99

Is this what you mean?

Filezilla doesn’t seem to have an option to change these nor does cpanel that I can see.

uid is the user owner. gid is the group owner. is aumensa the web user? sounds like it…

but yes, sp-resources and its contents should be set to the same uid and gid as wp-content for example…

most decent ftp programs allow you to set those – hard to imagine filezilla doesnt but its low end…

ssh is another way to change them…  or ask you host…

I seem to have fixed this from you suggestions as follows.

within cpanel created a new folder. In filezilla this had – aumensa aumensa

in filezilla, uploaded the the sp_resources folders to the new folder

Renamed (and later deleted) the sp_resources folder. with 99 99

Renamed the new folder to sp-resources.

Thanks

so working now?  cool!  thanks for the update!