VIDEO7: This is going to be Video #7, and in this particular video I’m going to show you How To Use the File Manager Effectively. FTP is not the only way to upload your files. You might have heard of FTP software, which is basically a file transfer protocol software that enables you to transfer files. Now if you are not aware of this and it sounds a little bit complex, then don’t worry about that, that’s the whole goal of this particular video. And in fact, cPanel’s File Manager not only allows you to upload only your files, everything from zip files and all of that, but you can also delete files, you can create directories, you can create and extract zip files, you can even edit files within this program and so much more.
So by showing you this I think this will simplify your life a little bit. And this is great in addition to that, especially if you need to install web scripts, like php scripts. And best of all you can do it without any fancy software, like we’ve talked about earlier, the FTP software, and you can do it on any computer that has access to the internet. So let me go ahead and jump right in and show you how it works.
So you should see the file manager at the very top. The icon may be different like I said earlier, but the File Manager name will be the same. So click on that, it’s going to open up a separate window, and I will warn you, you have to be very, very careful when you move your mouse because you could potentially more a file, a folder into the wrong folder or what have you. So just keep that in mind, be very, very careful while you are here.
So right now I’m in a website and most you’re going to see all these different folders here. The key to remember is that some of you will see public_html, and some of you might see http docs. Now if you’re unsure about where the file should be located you’ll need to contact your webhost, because some webhost companies will put it in a certain directory, but for the majority of you it should say public_html. So this should be the magic folder that holds all the files that show up on your website, all of the rest of folders here may pertain to your email system, to files that are related to other than what people actually see. So we’re going to click this here, and right after that you see a bunch of wp-, which basically tells you there’s WordPress site inside here. But if we scroll down here, I want to show you – there are number things that we can do. So inside this folder we can create a new folder, so if we want to do that we can click folder and we can type the new folder. So Create New Folder, and what we could do in this folder we can double click it, just like you would on a PC or a Mac computer when creating your folders. So same thing, but in this case, we can upload files, so we can click on upload and you can drag and drop files in here, or you can simply click Select File and upload files through there.
So in this case I can select an image, click Open, and that will upload the image. So when I’m done, I click go back to the new folder, and we can see that it is there. Now we could select the file, and you could see that other options show up. So we select the file, we can also download it, so we could click Download, and it will download it to your computer. So if you had a zip file, or a video file, that you have and you want to download it to your computer, you can do that. You can also delete the file, we can also compress it, so let’s say we have a good number of files that we want to compress into a zip file, we can select those files or select that folder and click compress. We can click Zip Compress, and it will compress it as you can see here. So we can click that, click download and there we go.
We can also delete a files, so you can select a file, click Delete, Skip Trash and permanently delete files, or if unselect it click Confirm. We could do that. We can also Rename, so we can rename the file here. We can also edit. Now it is an image file, so we can’t necessarily edit the image file on here. We can only edit files like text files and things like that. So let’s say for example we’ll click file, New File, and we’ll just name this file.txt. You can name it whatever you want to be. So we’ll do that, and we’ll click on Edit, and now you can see that we are actually able to edit this particular file, because it is a text file. You can also edit html file, so I could even do file.html. And if you’re not familiar with that html files are, they’re basically web based files. So we could click that, we could click HTML Editor, click Edit and then you’ll see the HTML Editor. And then of course you can create texts and increase the size and all of that. We’ll exit out of that.
And you could also set permissions, what permissions means is you are telling the system ok, as a user these are my abilities, these are my rights, I can edit the file. But the world can now, but if you wanted the world to edit, world meaning everybody else to do it, that you could do that, hopefully. I would not recommend that. You’re going to run into this situation, especially when you install scripts, especially when you upload the scripts and it’s going to ask you to change the permissions for certain files. So that’s good to know right there.
So that’s pretty much it as fast as file manager goes and as long as you understand those basics and understand that it operates very, very similarly to a Mac computer or a PC, then you are good to go.
