I apologize for the seemingly duplicate issue posting but I can’t seem to find someone who has come across my specific issue and resolved it. This post got close but I did everything they did.
When you create a page in WordPress, it’s just an entry in a database table; there’s no actual file at that location. However I can create a file at that location myself and it will steal the page away from WordPress. I delete the file and it seamlessly goes back to the WordPress page.
I’m trying to set up a WordPress site on a LAMP stack on Debian 6.0. From the WordPress documentation (and my experience on shared hosts) the correct permissions should be as follows