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Hey look… no FTP needed. OneClick for WordPress is a Firefox extension which aims to make your every day’s Wordpress maintenance more simple. The extension works in conjuction with a wordpress plugin, to make installing your Themes and Plugins easier and faster. You don’t even have to go to your WordPress dashboard to make the installations. You’re at a site… see a good plugin, right-click and choose “One Click Install > Plugin”… and BOOM… your plugin gets installed at your WordPress blog. Nice.

Once you have the plugin and the Firefox extension configured properly, you just right-click (Control-click on a Mac) on the download button for a plugin (or Theme), and select OneClick Install to send it right to your WordPress site.

When you install the WordPress plugin, your OneClick controls will be located under the dashboard tab. You can install without using FTP from this location too, and the page has a number of other controls on it when you scroll down, including the ability to delete plugins.

I thought this was a very interesting WP plugin/Firefox trick combination — I haven’t seen any other WordPres plugin, Firefox extension combinations, before (two of my favorite Open Source programs… but hey, the same concept could work out well for JOOMLA, Drupal, and others). Maybe Mr. Sanjeev, the plugin/extension author, will be starting something here — inspiration for more plugin/extension pairs. Other combinations come to mind, like a way to capture quotes and links to other blog posts, then automatically send them into a new post on your blog.

After installing the plugin (current version 0.9.8), by Anirudh Sanjeev, (go to his site at Thought Outflux — scroll down the page to find the download button ) you can install the OneClick Firefox extension.

To configure OneClick properly in Firefox, it must know your “OneClick URL”. That is given in the admin area for OneClick (scroll to bottom of page) — circled above. Next, you open “Tools > Addons” in Firefox, and scroll until you find OneClick listed, as shown above. Click on “Preferences” and paste in your OneClick URL. That’s it… your’re ready for OneClick uploading of WP plugins and themes.

Explaining the motivation to create the plugin, Mr. Sanjeev says, “It’s excellent for admins, non-techies, people with restrictive firewalls, and just about anyone who uses wordpress and installs plugins and themes.”

After installing, Mr. Sanjeev recommends that “If it doesen’t work right away, (might not work on 1% of the hosts), you may need to chmod to 755.” To do this, use a ftp client like filezilla, and right click, choose “file attributes”, and set write permissions for group.” Those of you that host with a cPanel control panel can use the file manager to set thes “chmod” (A UNIX command that changes the mode of a file, abbreviated from “change mode.” There are three modes a file can have turned on or off: read ability, write ability, and execute.) permision.

cPanel File Manager: Above, the “File Manager” is open from a cPanel installation, and you can see “chmod” controls properly set for the “oneclick” directory (red arrow).

FileZilla - Free Open Source FTP: Alternately you can use an FTP client that allows you to set your chmods — above, I’m using the excellent, cross-platform and open source FileZilla - http://filezilla-project.org. After you connect to your site using the URL, Username, and Password (for your hosting account), you: 1 - Right-click (Control-Click on a Mac) on the folder or file you wish to “chmod”, and select “File Attributes” on the pop-up menu; 2 - Change the Numeric value to 755 (which is the same as clicking the boxes in the configuration immediately above that field).

Before installing, OneClick will diagnose the system to check for possible update in addition to performing auto diagnostics to check whether everything is working properly.

Then… after diagnosis and any remedies, you’re ready with your Firefox AND WordPress time saver trick — a must for busy Open Source WebMasters and BlogMasters.