My folders look like this:

/home/username/example.com/htdocs (where I do the svn co wordpress)
/home/username/example.com/wp-content (where I map my wp-content to)

Apache Alias entry looks like this:

Alias “/wp-content” “/home/username/example.com/wp-content”

AllowOverride None
Options None
php_admin_flag engine off # optional

defines added to wp-config.php:

define( ‘WP_CONTENT_DIR’, ‘/home/username/example.com/wp-content’ );
define( ‘WP_CONTENT_URL’, ‘http://example.com/wp-content’ );

With this setup, the writable folders for my WordPress installation cannot execute PHP directly, which is a huge security benefit of using this technique. This may not work for everyone. If your open_basedir setting is set in PHP this may not work for you.

Anytime I install a new plugin, I first grep the source to make sure it doesn’t include the wp-config.php. If a plugin does include the wp-config.php anywhere, that’s an indication that the PHP in that plugin must execute directly, in which case you will have to remove the php_admin_flag engine off line above and add the hack I described in the last reply and put a wp-config.php in the /home/username/example.com/ folder.

From what I’ve seen themes & plugins do this because they want to provide custom CSS and AJAX hander with data from the database. Using the query_vars hook or the built in AJAX handlers in WP are much better way of doing this, as they will work for all WP installs.

require_once(‘../../../wp-config.php’);

Which means you cannot do what I was suggesting with using the Alias directive in Apache without creating an additional wp-config.php. Essentially, where ever your wp-content folder is located, a wp-config.php file must also be located for those plugins that try to include it.

To get my example to work, you would need to create a wp-config.php file in the same directory where you put the wp-content folder. In this wp-config.php, you would add a require_once function call with the absolute path where your actual wp-config.php is located. If you installed via subversion to /home/example.com/public_html/, then…

I’m in the process of moving a site to a new server and will be testing this out. Either way, I’m quite pleased the defines WP_CONTENT_DIR and WP_CONTENT_URL are available to us.

Just thought I’d add the svn error message here so it’s googleable:

svn: Directory ‘wp-content’ is missing

Any particular reason for removing the 301 redirect too?

RewriteRule ^wp-admin/(.*)$ wp/wp-admin/$1 [R=301,L]

to:

RewriteRule ^wp-admin(.*)$ wp/wp-admin$1 [L]

then your admin is also available as wp-admin instead of wp/wp-admin

What now is:

define( ‘WP_CONTENT_DIR’, dirname( ABSPATH . ‘/wp-content’ ) );

should be:

define( ‘WP_CONTENT_DIR’, dirname( ABSPATH ) . ‘/wp-content’ );

as you need the dirname of abspath only.