Pretty much anyone running a website has probably used Filezilla or another FTP client (or at least SCP) to do virtually all of their file management. And it's for good reason; Those tools are made specifically for the job. However, there are situations when you need to edit or change files on your website "on the go" - where you don't have access to your FTP client. And in those situations, you might want an easy GUI web-based fallback.
Shared hosting users have cPanel, which provides all of these tools built-in. VPS users don't have these tools by default. I personally use
Tiny File Manager to handle this, and it's a surprisingly simple flat-file script that is very elegant and streamlined. It can do everything that the standard cPanel tools can, and it's been pretty stable and quite powerful at the same time.
Granted, it probably won't ever replace Filezilla/SCP as a daily driver, but it's certainly a worthy fallback for when you need a backup. It can definitely come in handy...
I'm a huge fan of File Managers. They make things so much easier. I've never used TinyFileManager for my stuff (cPanel), but now that I know about it, I just might. The big thing putting me off from non-cPanel hosting was that I love the File Managers... Now I know there's an alternative. So, thank you!
Yea it's a fantastic script. cPanel's tools definitely come in handy and are good to have, so it's great to see alternatives for non-cPanel hosts.
I love this one because it's so simple and streamlined. It requires no installation. It is fully contained within three files, and the only configuration it requires is the username/password.
It honestly has all of the features you'd come to expect, and the multisite features and built-in code editors are also a very nice bonus (not even Filezilla can offer this!)
I don’t understand why people would put their code changes under source control so you can immediately revert if there’s a problem.
Yea, it's certainly advantageous to do so. Developers and professionals are well acquainted with these tools. For larger scale websites (or development projects), most certainly, version control is an absolute requirement.
It's not really
meant for the average wordpress website or blog/forum though. There is sort of this mindset in the developer community that every wordpress blog owner or forum owner should be an experienced developer, and 20 years ago, that was so. You couldn't get near web administration with a 10 foot pole unless you knew how to write your website from scratch. It was otherwise laughable to even try.
Today, that's simply not the case. There are tens of millions of blogs, forums, or other websites that aren't professonal/enterprise oriented, exist on shared hosting solutions, and don't get thousands of page views monthly. And while version control is great if you're well acquainted with it, the average phpBB administrator or WP-blog owner hasn't used Git before. For everyday taks such as updating config.php files, uploading logos/images, or updating plugins/mods, solutions like TFM/Filezilla are perfect.
That said, version control has compelling advantages. I do think that version control will become much more widespread over the next decade among these sorts of websites as well. The built-in snapshot features are useful for anyone.