Uploading images to WordPress didn’t work?

Update: Turns out if you have PHP set as Safe Mode WordPress has a hard time creating folders for you. Once I figured out how to turned it off (it was in my admin panel from my hosting service provider) things were working fine after I set the permission correctly to writable.

I just installed WordPress 2.6.3 from http://wordpress.org. I’ve tried WordPress before and it’s one of the most easiest blog software around. But I came across my first problem when I tried uploading an image. I checked the “Organize my uploads into month- and year-based folders” option so that it’s easier to backup the images as they are uploaded. My upload directory was set to “wp-content/uploads” since I didn’t want my images to be mixed up with.

But when I uploaded my first image, WordPress kept telling me

“Unable to create directory /var/www/vhosts/erawa.nu/httpdocs/wp-content/uploads/2008/11. Is its parent directory writable by the server?.”

I was reading many different stories and solutions online. This is how it worked for me.

1. I changed the permission to 777 of the wp-content directory
2. I manually created the uploads directory using my FTP client and set the permission to 777
3. disabled the organize files by month and day option.