WordPress, IIS and Plesk “Unable to find wp-content” Woes and Solution

I tried to help a co-worker with a professional blog for a TV channel yesterday and ran into some weird issues. We host the blog on a Windows 2008 server with IIS and Plesk. The WordPress install from within the Plesk worked fine but ours did not. The “white screen of death” on the install screen was perplexing (more on that at the bottom of this article), but every time he tried to either upgrade WordPress or install or upgrade a plugin or theme, he would receive warnings or failures stating that WordPress was unable to find the wp-content directory. This warning can take various forms but circle around the fact that WordPress did not find the right directory in the expected place. The obvious and painless solution is to upload the files directly to the server using FTP and then control the blog from within wp-admin. In this case, […]