My goal is to have any created directories and files to have 774 permissions.
Hi Todd,
Am I correct in assuming the php script that creates the directory uses the mkdir() function? If so something along the lines of: mkdir('mydir', 0774); should suffice. The 0 can be changed to 2, 4 or 6 depending on what combination of SGID & SUID sticky bits you want on the directory.