Custom Page Template in WordPress

I am using a Custom Page Template in WordPress. I followed these steps to make it:

1. Duplicated page.php file in the /wp-content/themes/themename/ directory to another file called, submit.php

2. Inserted the Template Name in the PHP code at the starting. I am unable to post the snippet here, stackoverflow is not displaying it.

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3. Now it shows up in the wp-admin panel under Page Templates.

I have an HTML form on the Custom Page of WordPress. The PHP will read the data entered by the end user in the text area and write it to a file stored on the server.

All goes well as long as I write this data to a file this way:

$fp=fopen("filename.txt","w") or die("Can't open the file");

However, as a result of this file will be available in the path:

http://sitename.com/wordpress/wp-content/themes/themename/filename.txt

So, it will store the data read from the HTML form in the current directory. Instead I want to write this to a file stored in another location. Let’s say:

http://sitename.com/wordpress/files/filename.txt

to do this, I modified the code this way:

$fp=fopen("../../../files/filename.txt","w") or die("Can't open the file");

The PHP script dies with the error message, could not open the file.

I tried writing the output to wp-content/uploads directory as follows.

$filename="../../uploads/".$cartype.".txt";
$fp=fopen($filename,"w") or die("can't open the file");

It Gives the error: can’t open the file.

$cartype is just a value that is read via the HTML Form input.

I have set the permissions for the uploads folder to 777 already.

I tried this as well:

$filename="/wp-content/uploads/".$cartype.".txt";
$fp=fopen(ABSPATH.$filename,"w") or die("can't open the file");

It again gives the error: can’t open the file.

Please note that, I am writing data into the file later this way:

fwrite($fp,$data)

Also, once I am able to do this, I would like to restrict the permissions to the “files” directory so that only the wordpress admin can read the files in that directory using FTP or similar alternative.

Thanks.