Forum Moderators: phranque
My problem is this: My mom is a person who calls something 'too complicated' if it involves clicking the mouse 3 times or greater. She is the secretary at a small school nearby. The school district got the bright idea to have every school make a website, and due to the fact that she is the most tech savy person at the school it has been left to her. And since she is always having problems trying to do things to the site, she needs me to help her.
I would like to get her set up with a better system for updating and uploading the site but I am having problems understanding how the uploading process she uses works.
My main point:
She was given a program called Nvu which is a very basic web design program. To upload she tells the program the www address of the site, and where she would otherwise type in an ftp address she types [server.abc.def...] along with a password. Then you just click upload and it gives you a progress bar saying uploading files... done.
My main question:
How are website files uploaded with https? I would have assumed that you would only upload files using ftp or sftp. I read something about configuring the web server to accept incoming POST requests to upload files that way (is that how this works?).
I need to find a method of uploading files that does not involve this terrible program known as Nvu. Is there any way I can use winScp
One other proint is that this program does not allow you to see the contents of the remote directory you are uploading to, it just sends the files related to the file you are currently working on, so I have no idea how you would delete an unused file or image off the server.
When I was doing some consulting with Blue Cross years ago, I was using SecureFX as the FTP client. The server needs to be configured - most web hosting providers will offer an FTP server. Some still "support" FPSE. And some will support SFTP or FTPS. You can use FileZilla as an FTP client. I know this will allow you to see other files / folders of the website if the username has been set up (for those permissions).
winScp - I just searched for it, it said it was an FTP client. You could probably use this to upload the files that are created using the username / password that you have. You would create the HTML pages using Nvu and then upload them using the winScp.
Of course, you could create the HTML pages using another editor (like the ones listed above) or NotePad, UltraEdit, etc if HTML is understood.
Because of the https this makes me think that updating files involves sending messages to the web server, and getting it to update the files, or maybe its using cgi scripts or something (maybe for security?).
When I try to log into 'abc.def.ghi' with WinScp it does not work, which I kind of expected since the server would need to be running an ssh or ftp daemon on that port, and I don't think they would run an ssh daemon on https port (which i think is 443).
It is possible that I have just been trying to log in wrong, but I've messed around with this thing for an hour or so and thought I should ask for some insight before they start thinking im trying to hack them.
Is it common to not have any ftp or sftp way to access your web hosted folder?
[edited by: Robert_Elder at 8:56 pm (utc) on Jan. 21, 2009]
it is typical for content management systems to upload content using http(s) protocol since the interface is usually web-based and it is typical for wysiwyg editors to upload content using ftp(s) protocols since the interface is usually based on a local client although most wysiwyg clients are also web-enabled for obvious reasons.
not surprisingly, ftp is a much more efficient protocol for file transfers.
I guess that would make sense because many of the people using this feature aren't fluent with computers. It would be nice if the tech guy had volunteered this information.
So it's likely that there is web based interface that she can log into to browse the served website directory?
this type of http interface can't happen without an appropriate cgi script on the web server.
in the case of ftp, browsing directories is part of the protocol.
