can't run without leaving permissions wide open?

[sunshinegypsy]

I used to use Wordpress, but I kept getting hacked. So I moved to Serenendipity. Still getting hacked. As I go to install yet another time, I realize that the darn thing won't run unless the templates_c folder is set to 777. Also, my template, andreas09, won't load no matter what I do. I had this problem before.

How do I make Serendipity go without having ANY folders set to 777 permanently? I'm using cPanel.

I wonder if part of the problem is that I'm fighting against the natural folder structure. I don't want to have Serendipity be in my file naming structure. In fact, I don't want a lot of the default naming structure that comes with S09 but changing that really screwed things up so I figured I'd just leave it alone.

At any rate, I have 2 domains. One, sunshinegypsy.com is my primary domain and equals /public_html. Beneath that is tsunshinelove, which equals /public_html/tsunshinelove.com

I've been extracting Serendipity into its own folder, then moving the contents up into the parent directories and then installing from there.

When I set the permissions in the templates & templates_c folders back to 755 from 777, I get this message when I try to load either domain:

Cannot write to directory /home/sunshine/public_html/templates_c. Please check the permissions.
Fatal error: Smarty error: [in file:/home/sunshine/public_html/templates/andreas09/entries.tpl line 2]: syntax error: unrecognized tag 'serendipity_hookPlugin' (Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 599) in /home/sunshine/public_html/bundled-libs/Smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php on line 1092

Cannot write to directory /home/sunshine/public_html/tsunshinelove.com/templates_c. Please check the permissions.
Fatal error: Smarty error: [in file:/home/sunshine/public_html/tsunshinelove.com/templates/default/entries.tpl line 2]: syntax error: unrecognized tag 'serendipity_hookPlugin' (Smarty_Compiler.class.php, line 599) in /home/sunshine/public_html/tsunshinelove.com/bundled-libs/Smarty/libs/Smarty.class.php on line 1092

[garvinhicking]

Hi!

If you keep getting hacked, your current FTP privileges or other software on the server is compromised.

You need to change all access/privilege information at once, and also make sure your client computer that you use has no trojans installed.

All s9y files/dirs do not actually need to be 777, they just need to have full read and write privileges from the Apache/PHP process. So you can adjust the chown according to your server-setup, and make Apache/PHP the owner of the writable files/dirs (templates_c, serendipity_config_local.inc.php).

HTH,
Garvin