How to let visitors download files without creating an account?

I’d just create a directory in webroot (the public_html), name it something non-obvious and stuff my files there. As longs as the permissions are set properly that should be fine.

If you need WordPress to actually handle your files for some reason then you’ll need a plugin.

WordPress can do just about anything but not all problems need WordPress itself as a solution.

Thanks, @jnashhawkins. I put the files in a folder and was able to go to that folder and actually call up the files one at a time by name, but wasn’t able to get a directory listing. I called GoDaddy and was told there’s not a way to get the listing, that I’d have to make an index.htm or .php file with the names on them. Since there are 55 files and we’ll be adding files in the future, I’m not sure I want to spend the time to create one.

Thanks, though.

Mathis…

To solve this issue, I purchased Arclab Dir2HTML ($29.00 USD) and was able to create an index.html file and it allows visitors to click the link in the index.html and download the files. There may have been a better and cheaper way to do it, but this one worked and didn’t take as long.

Thanks again,

Mathis…

On the original web servers, requesting the main domain name served up a directory listing of the html files on that server and the subdirectories under that ‘public_html’ directory.

There were two ways to stop that listing once Apache with its htaccess directives became available. One was by disallowing the directory listing via htaccess and the other was by providing an alternative file called index.html.

The disallow directory listing directive also was allowed as a http_config directive and index.html was soon extended to shtml to provide Server Side Includes. Then PHP came along and extended index.html even further with index.php.

So, if there’s an empty index.html in the directory then you won’t get a directory listing, it’s also possible the htaccess file is there but you might not be able to see it because it has a ‘dot’ in front of its name. Else the control panel may offer to hide or disallow directory listings by ‘jambing’ that directive into the httpd_config or the web server was manually configured to disallow directory listings.

Another option would be to look at the directory tree from your file manager viewer or file directory viewer of your FTP client. Cut then past that to an html file and drop that file into your new download directory.

Since you’re on GoDaddy you’ll either be running the Apache webserver on Linux or a Windows-based server using either Apache or IIS.

Call GoDaddy back when you have time and ask them how to allow that directory listing on just that one directory if you can find the Index.html or htaccess file in there via FTP.

Do be a little careful what you delete or rename but you should be able to solve this problem.