Correct location of civicrm.settings.php in CiviCRM 4.7 for WordPress

Question

I've got a WordPress site here (CiviCRM 4.7.17, upgraded recently from 4.7.15) which has two different civicrm.settings.php files:

1. wp-content/plugins/civicrm/civicrm.settings.php
2. wp-content/uploads/civicrm/civicrm.settings.php

File #1 contains the correct settings, and files #2 appears to have outdated settings.

Questions:

• Which is the correct path in CiviCRM 4.7?
• Can I just delete the one with the wrong path (after I ensure the correct one is in the right place)?
• Is the whole directory wp-content/{uploads,plugins}/civicrm in the same boat -- that is, is just one of them needed, and if so, what's the correct path for that directory?

Answer 1

The recommended location is wp-content/uploads/civicrm/civicrm.settings.php.

The deprecated location, still supported as of April 2017, was wp-content/plugins/civicrm/civicrm.settings.php, but this is both easy to break on upgrade ("whoops, I removed the old plugin and the settings files, and I don't have backups!") and on some sites is not a writeable location (where people prefer to not have WordPress able to modify its own codebase).

This can be seen in civicrm-wordpress/civicrm.php at line 103 and is documented in CRM-16408. Code docs refer to this as "the 4.6 and prior location" so I guess that tells us it's new to 4.7.

It looks like this was applied to all the related files, a WP site I set up the other day had everything in wp-content/uploads AFAICT, which seems like an improvement.

However, I noticed that civicrm.php looks like it gives preference to the deprecated location. IDK if there is a specific reason to this - it feels like it might set up a surprise for some sites if that behaviour ever changes?