SEO Expert Blog

Yesterday I spent about two hours looking for a bug, that prevented videos from being uploaded to a Drupal site using Drupal's built in upload.module. The latest SVN commit could not have been the reason for the error, because only two lines of descriptive text appearing on the front end were added.

Since my local installation worked fine, I suspected it to be either a problem caused due to incorrect file system permission settings or the source code on the live site being different from the latest SVN revision. So I checked permissions on the live server — unfortunately in the wrong directories — and compared files involved in the upload process. I didn't find any difference and was in the dark.

De- and re-activating the upload.module also brought no cure. More or less coincidentally I went to the admin overview (example.com/admin) to find an error message that pointed me to Drupal's status report (example.com/admin/logs/status).

The files directory was not writable. Aaaargh, why haven't I checked the status report in the first place. Instead of spending the time in front of my iMac I could have gone to a pub watching the Champions League matches that took place in the same time. I hope to remember the best practice to use the helpful information provided by Drupal itself. Repeat: Check the Status Report.