Installed PHP & MySQL, and now I have file permission er

Hi Everyone

This is my first post here!

I've had this problem for a little while now, and having recently made a move over to Mac for webdev, I'm desperate to get it solved so I can get back to coding.

I recently made a switch from using MAMP to making a separate installation of PHP, MySQL and Rails. I used the first tutorial for Rails + MySQL, and the second one for PHP;

http://hivelogic.com/narrative/articles ... -mysql-osx
http://www.entropy.ch/software/MacOSx/mysql/

Unfortunately, I now receive errors when trying to install activeCollab through it's own PHP install script, and WordPress won't let me import xml backups into a locally installed WordPress. This must mean that I don't have full Read/Write access to my 'Sites' directory (this is set as my default htdocs in the Apache httpd.conf). I haven't noticed any problems with Rails - so far it's only been PHP based CMS's which have thrown up the permission errors.

I've checked the file permissions on my 'Sites' folder - I'm the only user on the machine, and my account has full Read/Write access to the folder. However, I've noticed that there is also the option to choose 'Group' access, for which my account is again selected and given Read/Write access.

Then there is 'Others' category, and this has 'Read only' access. Is there an option in there which I need to select and give Read/Write permissions to? mysql, php ?

Or, is there a MySQL/PHP/Apache config file somewhere, within which I need to give global read/write permissions?

I didn't have this problem when I was served up local sites from MAMP - and I also configured MAMP to use the 'Sites' folder as it's default htdocs folder. I get the impression that because MAMP was installed as an 'Application', that it automatically inherited my user permissions - maybe PHP and MySQL don't inherit my user account permissions because they are services?...

Any help with this is very, very much appreciated!