When a plugin, theme, or even WordPress itself are updated, it downloads and saves the files (.zip, extracted files, etc.) to wp-contentupgrade. This is not always desirable.
For example, I run a portable version of WordPress from a flash-drive, so I donât want it using the flash-drive for temp files. I would prefer it to put temporary files in the systemâs temporary directory.
I already changed the temporary (upload) directory in php.ini as so:
upload_tmp_dir = ${Temp}
This works for regular PHP scripts, and while Iâve seen a couple of pages which seem to indicate that WordPress (3.0+) should use the default (upload? download?) temporary directory, it is ignoring it and still putting the temporary files in wp-contentupgrade.
How can this be changed?
Impossible. The path is hard coded in many places (
wp-admin/includes/update-core.phpfor example).I think this is worth a Trac ticket, if there isnât one already. We can move the directories for plugins, themes and mu-plugins. This is the last thing why we need a wp-content directory at all.
Update
There was a short discussion in ticket #25153. The result is a wontfix, because the
upgradedirectory enforces the existence of awp-contentdirectory (whatever its name is in your setup), and that should be kept in case the core needs to add further directories here later, for examplewp-content/libraries/.You can set the
uploaddirectory and thewp-contentdirectory to the same physical directory viawp-config.phpconstants. This should be clean enough for time being.