When we install WordPress for clients, we often include a nice selection of themes and some essential plugins. However, many people want to change the look of their site- by uploading new themes- or add new functionality to WordPress using Plugins. Here is how you update your WordPress install using FireFTP a free plug-in FTP for Firefox.

FTP stands for File Transfer Protocol, and the FireFTP extension for Firefox is a free, open source solution- other programs that do the same thing on a Mac are Fetch and Transmit. On a PC, you can get SmartFTP or FTP Explorer. FireFTP will do everything you need- and it’s free.
First you have to have Firefox installed- go to www.getfirefox.com to download a copy (if you haven’t already). Install Firefox- and don’t worry, it can reside peacefully next to Internet Explorer or Safari- you can have multiple browsers on your machine. It’s our opinion that you should make it your primary browser- and import all settings from your current default browser- but that is up to you.

Once in Firefox- go to TOOLS>ADD ONS

This will take you to the page where all the extensions are listed. Find the Search box- and type in FIREFTP- it should take you to this page: https://addons.mozilla.org/search.php?q=Fireftp&type=E&app=firefox

Click on FIREFTP, and then the “Install now” button. Restart Firefox and you should now have a little seahorse in your tool bar- and “FireFTP” as an option in your TOOLS menu.

The icons: back, forward (dimmed), refresh, stop, FireFTP (the blue seahorse), Sage, autofill, new tab.

Now that you have FireFTP installed- you have to set it up for accessing your WordPress installation.

These are instructions for our server– using a standard Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP (LAMP) running Cpanel.

First- click on the “Manage Accounts” text on the left side- create new account.

Main Tab: 

Account Name: What ever you want to call your site.

Host: url.tld (example: websitetology.com)

Login: your site login, will be different than your WordPress login

Password: your site login, may be different than your WordPress login

Connection type tab: 

Check “Passive mode”

Initial directories:

Local: a folder on your computer where you will keep your WordPress files.

Remote: www

Advanced tab:

No need to enter anything in these- although you can decide on how you want your file names to be structured- either Leave Case Alone, convert to lower case, or  CONVERT TO UPPER CASE (note- all files must not have spaces in them.)

Clicking on connect should open the connection- with your local folder on the left- and your www folder on the server on the right.

There will be a long list of files on the server- with a lot of them starting with WP – this is your WordPress install- the only, ONLY, folder you will move things in and out of is your wp-content folder.

Inside it you will find three folders,  Uploads, themes and plugins.

These are where you place your content- respectively.

Uploads is where the WordPress upload tool will place your files- using a year, month, date file hierarchy. Sometimes you may go in here to update a file, or check a link structure. Most of you will never have to access this folder.

The Themes folder is where you will copy the entire folder of a theme that you have downloaded to your computer from someplace like the WordPress Theme Viewer. To upload the file from your computer to the server- have the closed folder that contains your theme on the left, and the themes folder open on the right- select the theme on the left- and click the right arrow button in the center-FireFTP will begin the upload process.

To upload- select the file on left- Pool, click right arrow and it will move from your computer to the server.

Once the files are done the FTP process- you log into your WordPress admin panel- the Desktop, click on the presentation tab- and activate your new theme.

To upload Plugins- you do the same thing- only upload them into your Plugin folder.

If you have any questions- or run into problems with these instructions- please comment below- and I will update or clarify the instructions.

Alex King has come up with a very interesting plugin- Articles, which will allow you to organize your posts on a separate page in a non-chronological order.

Say you have written a lot about how to optimize WordPress and make it the Content Management System to end all Content Management Systems- and you want to pull those posts together in a way that displays them grouped by some format other than category tags- well this is it.

We’ll implement soon on Websitetology- to make an easy reference page on how to progress through WordPress from install to the top of Google.

Articles 1.0 | alexking.org
This plugin allows you to easily present a list of posts you select outside of your blog chronology. Very useful for featuring things that might otherwise slip into the nether regions of your archives. See it in action here.

One of the beautiful things about WordPress is that it creates valid code automatically for you (for the most part) and that should help you sleep well at night.

Not that most people understand what valid code is, or care- Google doesn’t (as proven in posts by Matt Cutts from Google). I seem to recall Matt citing something like less than 40% of sites actually validate.

For those of you who wonder- valid code is using perfect grammar and syntax for computers- not for us human beings. It can help with accessibility- which is important to those who count on it- and it helps with Google indexing your site- but, like a book that is written without any hint of the flavor of language- it can create very boring looking sites.

Mike Davidson coded ESPN.com before moving to newsvine.com– and he hates HTML generated typography so much- he invented a way around it- which can break “the standards”- so, he also decided to be a revolutionary- and create a standard breaking icon to put on his site- and explains his reasoning- and takes the heat of all geekdom. It’s a good read for those of you who understand webstandards- and should be enough to scare away the timid:

Mike Davidson: March to Your Own Standard
So what’s up with the little grey button at the bottom of this site? It is my official Invalidation Badge. It’s mere presence on every page of this site renders my entire domain XHTML 1.0 Non-Compliant. Invalid. Erroneous. Whatever you want to call it. Here are the various crimes this one line of code commits:

* An ampersand is not properly encoded
* An alt tag is missing
* An attribute called “myfavoritetag” is made up
* An attribute is missing quotes
* A script tag is missing its type and language attributes
* A non-closing tag is missing its trailing slash
* A tag is upper case… gasp!

By invalidating my entire site with this one line of code, I ensure that I am made aware the instant it matters. The instant this stuff starts to break anything in the real world, I will know. If I only had a few small errors on a few random pages around my site, I could easily miss the day when “the big switchover” happens and wind up with broken pages I don’t know about. And since this code is in the form of a server-side include, I can freely remove it with a few clicks.

It’s kind of like carrying a canary down a mine shaft with you. As long as the canary is alive and chirping, you know you’re okay for air. Actually, I guess it’s not really like that. read the rest of the article….