Its probably my stupidy here but i'm stuck on this and would appreciate the help.

I want my user to have full access to the local apache root folder, and i also want the apache to have full access to the same folder.

What i did was create a new group called DevGroup and i added my username and www-data there. also i changed the permissions to 770 to allow full group access

but now it wont allow me or the apache any kind of access to the folder.

here is what i get with ls

drwxrwx--- 12 root      DevGroup    4096 Sep 27 17:34 testFolder

which seems perfect but when i try as a user to access the file i get this

var/www$ ls testFolder/
ls: cannot open directory testFolder/: Permission denied

also when i try to access the a page in the folder from browser

[Thu Sep 27 17:47:16 2012] [error] [client 127.0.0.1] PHP Fatal error: 
 Unknown: Failed opening required '/var/www/testFolder/foo.php' 
(include_path='.:/usr/share/php:/usr/share/pear') in Unknown on line 0