WordPress and File Masks

I upgraded to Word­Press 2.3 at the week­end. Everything seemed to upgrade prop­erly with no data­base errors, but I was get­ting a 500 Intern­al Serv­er Error when I tried to look at the site pages. The error logs con­tained the answer – error: file is writable by others with a point­er to the main index.php file. This seemed a little odd to me, but I looked at the mask and sure enough, the index.php file (and a whole lot of oth­ers) was group-writ­able. I changed the mask on the dir­ect­or­ies to 755 from 775, and the files from 664 to 644, and then everything worked just fine.

I also changed the stylesheet; still tweak­ing but it’s mostly done. Com­ments welcome!