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Moving Stuff to Your Web Site

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Thu, 02/08/2007 - 18:40 — admin

Occasionally, you need to update something other than your content (database), like the style sheets, or new code levels.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol. It is pretty much the standard way to move stuff (files, code, style sheets, etc.) to your site. This is not how you will create content; that goes into the Drupal database.

Now, the postings on the Drupal site will tell you to get a fancy FTP program. If you are at least on Windows 2000, there is absolutely no need. You can do it with Windows itself and it will look just like another older and you can drag and drop. I find this process to be easier if you use Internet Explorer than some of the other browsers.

In your "Address" bar for your browser, enter ftp:username:password@ftp.domain.com< where username is your user name at your site (not Drupal), password is the password for that username, domain.com is your site's domain name (without "www").

This will take you to your site. In Linux, you'll probably have to click into the "public_html" folder to get to your Drupal stuff. Then just navigate to the correct folders from there.

Comments

Wed, 04/28/2010 - 14:19 — John Buehrer (not verified)

FTP like this is insecure

Hi. while this "easy FTP solution" might work to upload files, note that it's "insecure" in that your login name and password go over the Internet in clear text. Any hacker snooping your network, or looking at your computer's history files, can see it and login as you. A less convenient way - but still functional and not too cumbersome - is using the FireFox browser and the free FireFTP plugin which support TLS encryption (assuming your Drupal hosting site does too). There are other secure mechanisms too. Just a thought, as malicious hackers are everywhere...

Mon, 05/31/2010 - 15:54 — admin

You are correct

I use WinSCP now. A lot of hosting companies no longer allow the easy FTP solution.

The point of this book, however, was to get people up and running fast. The easy FTP technique will do that. At this point in the site development, most people will not have blipped on hacker radar yet.