So… switched a site from one host to another.

Installed Joomla, restored the database, restored the template folder, and then started installing Extensions.

First up was JCE. I downloaded the latest version, tried uploading/installing it from within Joomla’s Admin Panel, and then got the following message:

JFolder::create: Path not in open_basedir paths

Oh boy! Not so good.

Did a little searching around and came across some fixes, although the fix in my case turned out to be pretty easy.

Problem: The temp (tmp) folder wasn’t writable. You can check this from Joomla’s administrator panel by clicking Help, System Info, then choosing the “Permissions” section. unwritable = bad.

Solution: Actually, it’s just that the path set up while on the old host was different from the new host. All it takes is a different username, or a whack of other things. All you have to do to fix it, is drop into Global Configuration / Server and set the Path-to-Temp-Folder.

If you’re not quite sure what to enter, go back to the Help / System Info section and look at the last 4 entries (log, cache directory). Hopefully one of them’s pointing correctly and you can figure it out from there.

If not, try:
/home/username/public_html/tmp
…where username is your username (if you’re not 100% sure and are using CPanel you can open CPanel’s File Manager and look far at the left – you should see /home/something at the top of the directory tree. That something is the username.

If your Joomla install is in a sub-domain or addon-domain, adjust appropriately:
/home/username/public_html/my_website_directory/tmp

If you’re still having issues but are positive the path is correct, see if the tmp directory exists. If it doesn’t, try creating it and set the permissions to 777 while you install the program (then try lowering the permissions afterwards to help out security-wise).