I'm getting very frustrated.  I'm a newbie to Joomla and having a problem.  I manually installed Joomla so I can use version 1.5 and luckily have had no problems with the actual installation.  It's after the installation that is giving me fits!   

If I make ANY change at all to any template including the default templates it gives the error "the parameter-file/templates/whatever_template_name/params.ini is Unwritable"

If I look under systems in Joomla it tells me everything IS writable!  I took a look using File Manager and the templates folder in Joomla was listed as writable? 755?  Then I went in and tried to look at the actual templates 1 by 1 and the permissions (if I was looking in the right place  ) looked as if they were unwritable at 644?  Tried changing those permissions with File Manager, it said it was successful, I went back into Joomla to try editing the template.  Joomla said it was writable until again I made a change and again everything went to unwritable except in Joomla systems where it was still telling me I had writable files!

I'm just very, very frustrated and have no clue what to do, what to change to make this work!  I don't want to use the Fantastico install as it's not the current version of Joomla and I'd hate to try a upgrade on my own!  lol

I've posted this as have others in the Joomla forums but so far I haven't had a response.  Does anyone have any clue what I can do to make this work? I've tried uninstalling Joomla and reinstalling and for now I've uninstalled everything again and am just trying to find a fix first before I go through it all again.

TIA 
Martha

Thanks so much for your reply!  I have managed to take care of that problem to a extent

I finally got the permissions to stay where I put them long enough to fool around with the template...then of course putting them back to unwritable again.  sigh...now i'm having a problem setting my ftp in Joomla.  WHY does this have to be so hard?  or most likely it's ME making it harder than it needs to be! 

I keep getting the error in Joomla that my ftp isn't working.  Ok.  I know I have all the info correct except for one line in the config-php file.  Root.  What exactly is the server setting for this?  I have Joomla installed into my public_html directory.  I thought public_html was the root setting for ftp in Joomla.  Am I not putting it in exactly as it should be?  Would I type in just "/" for that?  I already know that typing in just "public_html" isn't correct. 

TIA if anyone can shed light on this for me.  In the meantime it's off to read our forums here and see if I can find the answer.

Thanks again for responding:)  I'm not quite sure if either I didn't explain my problem correctly or if I'm not understanding your solution.

I'm looking in my configuration.php file.  I'm seeing this concerning ftp within the J! app..

var $ftp_enable = '1';
   var $ftp_host = 'ftp://mydomain.com/';
   var $ftp_port = '21';
   var $ftp_user = 'my username';
   var $ftp_pass = 'my password';
   var $ftp_root = '/';

Now that last var.  the $ftp_root.  I believe my problem is with that paticular variable.  It's my understanding that it needs to be set exactly as Lunar has it set...does that make any sense? 

When I activated the ftp var within Joomla during my installation I "guessed" at that var putting in public_html...evidently that wasn't the correct setting.  With ftp enabled I get a error in Joomla now when trying to make a change that says JFTP can't connect (I might have the wording wrong but that's the gist of it) and then my change doesn't take effect.  I'm just trying to figure out the exact var for that $ftp_root...I'm thinking (hoping) that will take care of my problem.

Again thanks so much for your help!  I really appreciate your time chatting with me about this    I'll admit I got confused with those values you showed me.  I tried to find something that looked similar but I'm not seeing it.