What we need is a little lateral thinking. Now, if you have a static IP address you could turn on FTP and upload that way, but what if that’s not an option either? As fortune would have it, WebShell allows us to use a wonderful tool called ‘wget’, which is more or less short for ‘web get’ – a very tricky name indeed. What could it mean? Simply it allows us to grab any file that you can click to in a web browser and copy it into your WebShell. Now do you see where we are going?

The best way to get the theme in is to first navigate to your blog/wp-contents/themes directory in WebShell. Next, try to find the original URL of your theme on the web (this will usually be a .zip archive, which is great for this job.) Now use the ‘WGET’ button that you see at the bottom of the WebShell page. Just paste in the URL of the theme’s archive, click ‘get’ and wait. Once your theme has been transferred to your WebShell, click on it once and then use the ‘uncompress’ button to, well, uncompress the archive. Now your theme will be ready to use.

What if you cannot find a nice link to the archive?

Sometimes the download link is obscured behind a link like this :
http://themes.wordpress.net/download.php?theme=2575
and WebShell will only get you a file like ‘download.php’ – which isn’t very helpful.

Fear not! This is where your ISP’s free web hosting space comes in handy. Remember that? Most ISP’s do provide you with free web space on their site, usually something like : ‘members.ispname.com/yourname’ go and check now, you probably do have it available.

Now that you have your free web space ready, upload the archive there and go back to the previous step. This time, however, replace the original URL of the theme archive with the URL to the archive in your account at your ISP. Easy.

Also managed to edit my .htaccess file – which seemed quite hard at first!

Here in H-Sphere land we don’t allow direct shell access to accounts, which on the whole saves a great deal of grief. Occasionally we need to think outside the WebShell box, however

WebShell allows you to do all the normal tasks you might want a shell for, but in a controlled web based interface. Now, the standard way of creating a .htaccess file (and the normal reason) is to use the ‘edit .htaccess’ button (or create button) which allows you to create a list of usernames and passwords that will be allowed access to the folder in question.

However there’s no way to manually add other lines in there, like to add ‘mod_rewrite’ rules for WordPress to make nice permalinks with. So – in Settings allow all files to be seen, then use the File command to create a new .htaccess file and paste in the mod_rewrite rules that WordPress has kindly suggested. Done.