Webmasters Forums

Our website uses WordPress, so all of its content, plugins and what-have-you can be accessed through ftp.

I need to rename several .php and .html files to give them more logical nomenclature. Of course, all the links and references would have to be fixed, too. It seems that the only way I can do this would be to open the ftp, copy everything in it to the hard-drive, use a multifile find-and-replace tool, and upload the whole directory again.

Is there an easier way?

Unfortunately, there is not. A script to run on the server would work too, but you'd have to have extensive knowledge in PHP or another server-side language, which would be much more difficult than the way you said. My suggestion is to do it, then upload it to a /new/ folder. Then when everything's done uploading, rename the old folder (/public_html/?) to /public_html.old/ and then rename /new/ to /public_html/, which would give you far less downtime and site errors than uploading and overwriting each file.

Good luck :) Hope it all works out!