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About the Author
Bob Hart is the Director of Product Management here at BigCommerce. He is focused on making the product the best e-commerce platform on the planet. Bob loves to spend time with his family, play sports, explore the outdoors and read. |
FTP support is being discontinued in the near future. If you (or your designer) use FTP to upload and change design files then you’ll now use WebDAV instead. WebDAV displays your BigCommerce store as a folder on your PC or Mac – exactly how file sharing software like Dropbox or Google Drive works.
Figure 1: You can now access your BigCommerce files in the same way as Dropbox
Technology has a way of reminding us that time doesn’t stand still. There are always better pieces of information to act upon, technological advances being discovered, and new ideas being put into practice. In order to keep up with the needs of the rapidly-changing e-commerce environment, BigCommerce is updating the way you interact with the files that your site relies upon by implementing WebDAV as the preferred method to manage the files for your store. WebDAV makes processes such as uploading products, product images and editing design files quick and painless.
Since FTP is going away soon you will need to prepare yourself (and your store) for this change. We have created a few resources to make the transition straightforward and worry free. If you have been using FTP and are not familiar with WebDAV, just think of it as a way to upload, download, and edit files located in your site’s document library from the convenience of your desktop. For those of you who use cloud-connecting apps such as Dropbox, WebDAV will seem very familiar to you. Similar to Dropbox, you use your own computer to create a link to your repository in the cloud.
Here’s how easy it is: from your “Computer” view in Windows Explorer, simply click on Map network drive.
When prompted, just paste in the link provided to you from your control panel under File Access. You’ll then be asked to login using your credentials for the control panel, and PRESTO…you will see your files.
Figure 2: Setting up WebDAV on a PC
Click on Go from the top menu in Finder, and then choose Connect to Server.
Figure 3: Setting up WebDAV on a MAC
When prompted, just paste in the link provided to you from your control panel under File Access. You’ll then be asked to login using your credentials for the control panel, and PRESTO…you will see your files.
Just to summarize, this method allows you to manage your site’s files the same way you would manage your files on your computer. For more detailed information on how to use WebDAV, please see the Knowledge Base article here.
John Reply:
July 18th, 2012 at 4:29 pm
As a follow up – I tried several methods of connecting using webdav on Unbuntu – with the following results :-
Firefox (supposed to support natively) : Got a method not supported error when connecting
Webdav and mount the webdav folder in Terminal : Could connect but couldn’t write a new file (an jquery file) to the /content/ folder
Cadaver in Terminal : could connect but using PUT or MPUT resulted in the session hanging.
The only way I could work on my clients site to do what I needed to was to find an old Windows PC, copy the files to a memory stick on Unbuntu, read it in Windows and use the standard Webdav functionality – not something that I want to have to remember to do every time I need to use Webdav
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