Cianer.com

While setting up the website for the Dog Trainers Association of Ireland Ltd I came across a recurring error whenever I tried to enable FTP upload: JFTP::write: Bad response followed by the warning An Error has occurred! Unable to open configuration.php file to write!

I checked the permissions on configuration.php and user www had write access so all was ok there.  As futher proof this error only appeared when I tried to enable FTP.  I spent a lot of time googling the problem and found lots of people rambling about permissions and suggesting it was a bug in Joomla 1.5.7, but after checking permissions for the 100th time and upgrading to Joomla 1.5.14 I still had the problem.

The solution:

1. You must have the absolute path to the directory rather than a relative one.  So instead of dtail.org/ I needed to put /usr/www/dtail.org/ in the ftp_root box (i.e. the $ftp_root variable in configuration.php).
2. Disable the Flash uploader.
3. Check the Flash uploader has actually been disabled.
4. Check it again, seriously.  I had to set it three times before it would "take" and testing in the meantime led me to believe it didn't work and made me want to stick my head in the oven.  The flash setting doesn't seem to be stored in configuration.php either so you can't manually set it.

I've been banging my head off this for a while since the (a) error message is so misleading and (b) disabling the flash uploader is unreliable.  Six lashes with a wet cabbage for the Joomla programmers!