Fixing WordPress “WP_CONTENT_DIR” Theme Directory Does Not Exist Issue

If you are developing a site and have WordPress in a sub-folder managed as as Git submodule or just in a separate folder with a wp-content folder in the root directory one up from your WordPress install you might have encountered an issue where your themes and plugins aren’t found.

You might get a message that looks like this, “twentyfourteen – The theme directory does not exist.” this is because there is a problem with how your paths have been defined in wp-config.php

I turned my head inside out trying to resolve this and the fix was rather simple. You might notice that this issue is happening on a Bitnami WAMPP stack or XAMPP installation because of the nature of how paths work (especially on Windows).

At the end of your wp-config file you’ll see the line where the ABSPATH constant is defined right before the wp-settings include. What you will want to do is actually move this to the very top below the opening PHP tag.

You should then end up with something like this:

Please note, I have my WordPress install in a sub-folder called “wordpress”, so rename all occurences of “/wordpress” with whatever your sub-folder has been named. Same goes for the wp-content folder, if you’ve called it something else, changing all instances of “wp-content” to your prefered named folder.

Any issues you were having with defining the “WP_CONTENT_DIR” constant should now be resolved.