Today's Challenge - Permissions

I've decided to look into at least trying plug-ins for the three major applications I'm looking at:

The RSS Reader
A Forum
A Polling application

I figure if I get each of them started, I can pull together just one almighty list of issues (adding on to that from my subscription form) and then start working through them, rather than cop any more new surprises. Warning, Alistair, you may get a marathon email in the next few days.

I'm also going on the premise that I'm doing this subject to learn about this stuff, and making loads of mistakes and then working out how to fix them is an awesome way of learning. I reckon I'm going to need some help on the working out bit though.

So, the latest challenge is installing phpBB - my chosen Forum plug in. My system meets most of the application's requirements, it's only when I get to the bottom of the 'Requirements' page that things get a tad tricky:

Required - In order to function correctly phpBB needs to be able to access or write to certain files or directories. If you see “Not Found” you need to create the relevant file or directory. If you see “Unwritable” you need to change the permissions on the file or directory to allow phpBB to write to it.

I'm getting the 'Unwritable' flag so need to work out about the permissions. Now given the amount of fun we had back at the beginning of the semester just getting the access etc set up, I'm a little nervous about whether I'm even vaguely able (or allowed!) to to this.