Thanks for alerting me to the forum submission issue. It seems like our firewall wrongly interpreted your post as an attempt to inject code.
To be honest, I’m reluctant to change the code for establishing the /wp-content directory path for your use case because the current code has evolved over many years to provide maximum compatibility with various server environments and WP configurations.
And I agree with this behaviour being flagged as a PHP bug. Do you know if it has it been fixed on newer version of PHP e.g. PHP7?
Unfortunately, there is no sign that the PHP bug is going to be fixed anytime soon.
I understand you being cautious about changing the code. You know better what problems you stumbled upon during the years.
Keep in mind though that I have other plugins setup in the same way with symlinks and they do not have this problem they write to wp-content just fine (e.g. Duplicator, WP Rocket, Updraft). These plugins are also heavily used by the community and they do well in this setup 🙂
There are several workaround ideas, please consider them 🙂 :
Add a config option to Preferences, e.g. “Plugin is installed in a symlinked location”
Add detection for symlinked plugin location, i.e. compare the root path of __FILE__ with ABSPATH and if they differ then use the code I suggested, otherwise use the original code
