4

Removing User Access To A Product And Deleting Users

Expired Users

Users whose access has expired – i.e., today’s date is greater than the access end date for a specific product – automatically lose access to all of the content within the product. You don’t really have to do anything to prevent them from not accessing the content.

NOTE: If you actually *want* your members to have access to previously paid for content (content that they were paying for before their account expired), then you can do that by setting the config field “Setup > Config > Advanced > Allow access to previously-paid-for content even after subscriber cancels?” to “Y”. If this is set to “N” (which is the default setting), then as soon as a member’s account expires, they automatically lose access to all content in the product.

Manually Removing Complete Access to a Product

1. First search for user in the “Users > Manage” screen.

2. At the end of the user’s row of information, you’ll see a link called “Remove”. If you click on this link, the user will completely lose access to the Product – like they never ever had access to it. You will lose all history on that specific product access (when did they first sign up for that product, when they expired, etc). So use caution when completely removing access in this manner. Of course, nothing happens to the user data itself. And their actual order information (“Orders” page) also remains intact, and you can view it on the “Orders” page by searching using a transaction number or email id. It’s only the user’s access to the specific product that is removed.

Rolling Back Access to a Product

If you just want to roll-back access by a month, instead of completely removing access, then you can do this from the “Users > Manage” screen, by searching for the User first, then checking the check box next to their record, and then selecting the “Rollback Access for Selected User(s) to the Product by 1 Recurring Cycle” and picking a product name from the drop-down.

Deleting users

If you wish to completely remove the users from your database, then check the check-box next to the user’s row, and then in the upper right hand section, click on the “Go” button next to the text “Fully Delete Selected Users from the database”. That should do it.

22

How To Directly Sign-up Affiliates

Now please note that every member is automatically enrolled as an affiliate. Which means, that the moment they become a member, they are also an affiliate by default. So your members are all automatic affiliates, and if you wish to create a page for them where they can get their own unique affiliate link and affiliate stats, then you can create an “Affiliate Info” page as explained here.

However, there may be times when you wish to directly sign up affiliates – those who may not be or become actual members, or those who you do not expect to buy anything just to become an affiliate (like your JV partners or super-affiliates), or simply those whose help you want in promoting your site, but don’t wish to give them any content access.

In those cases, here’s how you can create a direct affiliate sign-up form for JV partners and super-affiliates.

Using an “Affiliate Signup Page”

1) Create a new DAP Product called “Affiliates”

2) Select the product in DAP products page and set “Allow Free Signup?” to “Yes“.

In the price&recurring tab (DAP products page), set “Is this a FREE product (that has FREE content)?”  to “Yes”.

3) Use the product’s “Generate “Free Signup” Form Code“, and publish it on any page of your web site. Let’s call this the “Affiliate Signup Page”

4) Now this form has 2 fields: First name & Email. Anyone can sign up via this form by entering their first name and email id, and DAP will create an account for them, and they will have access to one product, which is “Affiliates”

It’s then up to you whether you want to publicly link to this “Affiliate Signup Page” from your home page (using text that says “Affiliates, Click here to sign-up”). Or if you don’t wish to allow anyone and everyone to be able to sign up as an affiliate – and subsequently signing up through their own affiliate link (of course, they’ll use someone else’s name during the purchase 😉 – then don’t make this page public. And email the link only to your future partners or affiliates.

Manually adding Affiliates from the backend

1) Log in to DAP Admin Dashboard

2) Go to Users > Add

3) In the “Add New User” table, enter the affiliate’s first name, last name (optional), select the product “Affiliates” (which you must have created previously), and add them to that product.

33

How Do Members Get Added To Your Membership Site

(OR) How do members get access to the content

(OR) How does someone become a member?

With DAP, you can add users to your membership site in 3 different ways.

1.  PURCHASE: Someone buys your product or subscribes (“Paid” member with access to both free and paid content)

2.  FORM SIGNUP: Someone signs up through a signup form (“Free” members with access to only free content)

3. ADMIN ADDED: You add them as a member directly through the DAP Admin Control Panel (you can mark them as either “free” or “paid”)

All three are explained in detail below.

1. PURCHASE

*You first create a “Sales Page”.

On your sales page, depending on which payment processor you use, you go to Paypal/1ShoppingCart/ClickBank and create a new product with the EXACT same name as the product you created within DAP, and get the ‘Buy Button’ link from your Payment Processor. Publish this “Buy Button” on your sales page.

* Your visitor goes to your sales page

* They purchase your product

* Your payment process (Paypal/1ShoppingCart/ClickBank) notifies DAP that you have a new purchase.

* If the product names match, DAP automatically creates an account for them, generates a random password, and sends them an email with their email/password. You can customize the contents of this email on the “Templates” screen in your DAP Admin Control Panel. Integration with your shopping cart explained elsewhere (see documentation for setup).

That’s it!

That’s how “buyers” get added to your membership site and get access to the product they just purchased.

2.  FORM SIGNUP:

You wish to give someone a “Free” membership.

NOTE: “Free” members who do not have a payment associated in DAP (which means they have not purchased anything) will have access only to content that you have marked as “Free”.

Once you have created a Product in DAP, and have added content (blog post/page links, links to files, etc), and have saved it, on the Product page, below the Product name list, you will see a link called “Direct Signup HTML”. (See image below). You must first select a Product before you can copy the correct form HTML.

Fig 1. Direct Signup Link on Products page

Fig 2. Form HTML that you get on clicking the Direct Signup Link

This HTML gives you the full HTML form code that you can publish on any page of your web site. This form only collects an email address and a first name.

Take this HTML code and publish it on page of your web site where you want sign up users. This could be a WP page or post too.

Note: When you see the above HTML code, there’s a field in there that looks like this:

<input type=”hidden” name=”redirect” value=”http://YourSite/Your-login-page-link/?msg=Success!%20Your%20membership account%20has%20been%20created.%20%20Check%20your%20email%20address%20in%20a%20few%20minutes%20for%20your%20password“>

Don’t forget to change the text above, where it says “http://YourSite/Your-login-page-link/?…” to point to your actual domain name and to your actual login page (if you have customized it).

Then, when someone enters their email address and first name and signs up through the signup form, DAP creates an account for them using that email address, creates a random password, and sends them an email with their email/password.

After that, you can drip any content or emails on them that are marked as “Free” (when adding content or emails).

At some later point, if they purchase any of your “Paid” products (see the “1. Purchase” section above), then as long as they use the same email id during purchase, DAP will automatically give them access to all of the “Paid” content in the Product that they just purchased.

3. ADMIN ADDED:

If you wish to directly give someone access to a Product and all its content and emails, you can add them directly from the DAP Admin screen (Users > Add/Edit).

You just need their email id and their first name (both of which they can change subsequently) to add them to a Product.

While adding them, you have the option of marking them as a “Paid” user by checking the “Mark as Paid” checkbox.

If you don’t check this check box, then they will be added as a “Free” user and get access only to “Free” resources (content/emails).

But if you check the “Mark as Paid” checkbox, then they will get access to all “Paid” content and emails, just like someone who is actually a “Paid” member.

15

Logout Link

Login/Logout Widget

If you are using the DAP Login/Logout widget on your sidebar, then the login widget automatically turns in to a “Logout” button once a member has logged in. No separate link needed if you’re using this widget. Click here to read more about the Login/Logout widget.

Logout link in your Menu

If you have a custom menu (WP Admin > Appearance > Menus), then you can add a custom link that points to “/dap/logout.php” or “http://YourSite.com/dap/logout.php” to your menu. This link will log your users out of both DAP and WordPress.

 

Default DAP Member Page

If you use the default member’s area that comes with DAP out of the box – http://YourSite.com/dap/ – then this page already has a “Log out” link at the top.

But if you are putting all of DAP’s member pages within your WordPress blog using our various shortcodes, then you need to publish the DAP logout link in your sidebar (or wherever you choose to).

Here’s the link for logging out of the member’s area:

http://YourSite.com/dap/logout.php

Replace “YourSite.com” with your actual site name, of course. And then publish the above link anywhere on your blog – sidebar, top menu bar, etc.

 

NOTE: Clicking on the DAP log out link will log you out of both DAP and WordPress.

 

6

Plugin Errors

(1) When Activating LiveLinks

If you are seeing an error that looks like this when you try to activate LiveLinks…

Fatal error: Cannot redeclare dap_filter_posts() (previously declared in /home/sitename/public_html/wp-content/plugins/DAP-WP-LiveLinks/DAP-WP-LiveLinks.php:11) in /home/sitename/public_html/wp-content/plugins/DAP-WP-LiveLinks/DAP-WP-LiveLinks.php on line 11

First click on the DigitalAccessPass link on the left side bar of your WP admin panel and see if you able to login to the DAP Admin Panel successfully.

If yes, then  you can ignore this error. If not, try out these solutions one-at-a-time.

Solution A) This could be because you have incorrectly named the DAP or Livelinks folders.

Remember, the dap folder must always be named dap (all lower case – and not, say, dap_v4.3). And the livelinks folder must be named DAP-WP-LiveLinks .

Solution B) Make sure you have installed dap to the root of your site/domain. If you installed it right, you will be able to access this URL:

http://yoursite.com/dap/phpinfo.php

Note: Replace yoursite.com with the name of your site.

Now go back to WP admin panel -> plugins  and de-activate and re-activate the DAP-WP-LiveLinks plugin.

Solution C) Go to /dap folder on your site

Rename dap-config.php to dap-config.old.php

Now go back to WP Admin -> Plugins -> de-activate and re-activate DAP live links plugin.

Solution D) Go to WP admin panel -> plugins

Try to de-activate all active plugins. Just activate DAP-WP-LiveLinks first. See if it works. Then re-activate all other plugins one-at-a-time to find out if there is a plugin conflict.

Solution E) Go to WP admin panel -> Appearance -> Theme

Try to de-activate the currently active theme and use the WP default theme. Now go back to WP admin -> plugins and de-activate and re-activate DAP Live Links plugin and see if that resolves the issue. If yes, it points to a theme issue and you might have to consider switching the theme or contact the theme developer for a possible fix.

Solution F) This applies to DAP installation on a sub-domain or add-on domain.

If you are installing DAP on a sub-domain or an add-on domain, then this problem is likely because the path to the root of your site does NOT match the server document_root.

Here’s how you can figure out the siteroot and document root.

Run this command in a browser window:

http://yoursite.com/dap/getpath.php and note down the path. That’s the path to the root of your site.

Run this command in a browser window:

http://yoursite.com/dap/phpinfo.php and search for document_root. Note down the path. That’s the path to the document root of your site.

NOTE: replace yoursite.com above with the name of your site.

If the only difference is that the first one (getpath.php) has a /dap at the end, then it’s fine. But if getpath.php results in a different path than the one returned by phpinfo.php, then you will have to update wp-config.php with a new siteroot definition using the value returned by getpath.php.

Copy the results of getpath upto /dap as shown below and add it to wp-config.php.

For ex – if getpath.php returns – /home/yoursite/yoursite.com/dap, then this will be what goes into wp-config.php

if ( !defined(‘SITEROOT’) )

define(‘SITEROOT’, ‘/home/yoursite/yoursite.com’);

Please Note :

Replace backticks (‘) above with single quotes in the define statement. When this document is updated, wordpress replaces single quote with backticks, but if you copy and paste the define statement above directly from this document to your wordpress config file, remember to change backticks back to single quote.

Now try to re-activate dap live links plugin.

If it succeeds and installs DAP successfully, then go back to /dap folder on your site. You will now see a new file called dap-config.php. Edit the dap-config.php file.

Add the same line to dap-config.php also.

if ( !defined(‘SITEROOT’) )

define(‘SITEROOT’, ‘/home/yoursite/yoursite.com’);

That’s it. You will not see any of these warning/errors after that.

NOTE: here ‘/home/yoursite/yoursite.com’ is just a sample, you need to use the path returned by http://yoursite.com/dap/getpath.php on your site.

Solution G) It is possible that your web site does not meet the minimum requirements to run DAP .

If you open a ticket and give us your FTP info and your WordPress Admin login info, we can confirm this to you right away.

— *** —

If you are seeing an error that looks like this when you try to activate LiveLinks…

Oops! Could not create the config file (dap-config.php). Please make the ‘dap’ folder writable by doing CHMOD 755 (and if that doesn’t work, then try CHMOD 777.)

Installation failed. Please de-activate LiveLinks and re-activate it when you’ve fixed the issue. (106)

* CHMOD just the dap directory to 777.

* Then de-activate and activate the LiveLinks plugin.

* This time around, it should be able create the dap-config.php file within the dap directory. You should see the successful installation message.

* CHMOD just the dap directory back to 755.

If that doesn’t work, then open a ticket with the FTP info and WP admin info.

————————————————————

(2) Session Error

If you see an error that looks like this…

Fatal error: Dap_Session::isLoggedIn() [dap-session.isloggedin]: The script tried to execute a method or access a property of an incomplete object. Please ensure that the class definition “Dap_Session” of the object you are trying to operate on was loaded _before_ unserialize() gets called or provide a __autoload() function to load the class definition in /home/site/public_html/dap/inc/classes/Dap_Session.class.php on line 41

This is basically caused by someone else’s 3rd-party WordPress plugin that is wiping out the “session” data (or user data stored in memory) which DAP relies on to store the user information. So there are two things you can try…

1. See if you have a plugin by name “WordPress Automattic Upgrade” in your wordpress plugins page.This has created many issues for so many other plugins too, including LiveLinks. Just de-activate this plugin, and your error should go away. Also, if you are using WordPress version 2.7.1, you don’t really need this plugin any more – the automatic upgrade feature has been built right into this version.
2. See if you have a plugin for doing “Captcha” – this is where to prevent bots from spamming your comments, your visitor is presented with some kind of an image to verify that they are human. Try with that de-activated.
3. If none of the above worked, or if you don’t have any of the above plugins active and you’re still seeing the error, then just try de-activating all other plugins temporarily (except LiveLinks, of course), and turn them back on one-by-one.

Refresh your blog page every time you activate a plugin. That way, you will know which is the plugin that is causing the error.

If that still doesn’t help, just open a support ticket and we’ll take care of it.

————————————————————

(3) PDO Error

You see an error like this:

Fatal error: Class ‘PDO’ not found in /home1/knowlee3/public_html/buildamagneticnetwork/dap/inc/classes/Dap_Connection.class.php on line 19

If DAP had been working fine on your web site, and you all of a sudden see this error, then your host quietly pulled the rug from under your feet :-). This appears because they either deliberately or mistakenly disabled the “PDO” library, which is a must-have requirement for DAP to run.

So check with your host and ask them “if they disabled PHP/PDO for MySQL on your server recently”.

————————————————————

(4) Memory Allocation

You see an error like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 33554432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 16 bytes) in /home/yoursite.com/public_html/dap/inc/classes/Dap_Connection.class.php on line 19

Or you see a blank screen after activating DAP LiveLinks.

a) Your server has a low memory limit set by your host, and your host needs to increase the memory allocated to PHP/PDO.

Add this line to the top of your wp-config.php file:

ini_set('memory_limit', '64M');

OR…

b) Sometimes, this is not really related to memory at all, even though the message appears to indicate so. Instead, the issue could be that the database connection parameters in /dap/dap-config.php file are invalid/incorrect. And that manifests itself appearing to be a memory issue.

So, maybe you recently made some changes to your DAP files or web site files, and overwrote/updated your dap-config.php file with the wrong database information. For whatever reason, it’s possible that DAP is unable to connect to the database because of incorrect information in the dap config file. Check the database settings within your dap-config.php file and make sure it matches your wp-config.php file.

————————————————————

(5) Simple-Pie & Memory Allocation

You see an error like this:

Fatal error: Allowed memory size of 37423432 bytes exhausted (tried to allocate 371520 bytes) in /…/public_html/~username/wp-includes/class-simplepie.php

Open the file wp-config.php (which is in your blog’s main folder)

Add this line at the top…

define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '64M');

That should take care of the error.

————————————————————

(6) Data Inserting/Saving/Updating Issues

• You get a 403/404 error when updating things, or data doesn’t get saved and nothing gets updated, when (for eg.) you try to save the DAP license key in Setup > Config
• Same kind of issues when trying to update Product settings or Product page doesn’t even load and comes up blank, or
• You try saving something in DAP and it doesn’t get saved
• Clicking on double-optin activation link (after going through DAP free signup) ends up in a “Sorry, missing fields” type of message and takes you to the link http://YourSite.com/dap/error.php?msg=MSG_MANDATORY
• You get random blank pages in DAP Admin
• You randomly get the “License Error” page even when you’ve actually entered the license key and all pages work most of the time.
• You were simply sent here by the DAP support team because they suspect it’s this issue (even if you don’t have the same issues listed above)

Weird, inexplicable, illogical stuff happening: This is the typical symptom of something called “Mod Security” being installed on your host, that is preventing DAP from accessing the database.

So please open a ticket with your host, and tell them this…

“I have a WordPress plugin on my site that is showing unexpected behavior and database errors when I try to save any data. The developers tell me that there is probably Mod Security installed on the server where mysite.com is hosted. So ideally, please disable it, in case it is enabled. Or at the very least, please white-list all requests coming from yoursite.com/dap/ so that the plugin is able to do its job.”

Once they fix that, then try whatever was not working before, and this time, it should work fine.

————————————————————

(7) Installation Errors With DAP v4.4.x

a) After installing (or upgrading to) DAP v4.4, your site doesn’t load properly.

b) Or you get a an error that looks like the one below and your WP admin doesn’t load, won’t let you log in, or shows a blank screen.

Fatal error: Call to undefined function mcrypt_decrypt() in /home/XYZ/public_html/yoursite.com/dap/inc/functions_admin.php on line 3839

This means that your server is missing a standard PHP library – usually installed on most web servers – called “mcrypt_decrypt” that is used by the new DAP v4.4 for encrypting users’ passwords. Please ask your web host to enable that library, and after that, if you activate the DAP LiveLinks plugin in WordPress, it should work fine.

If your site is not loading, then temporarily rename the wp-content/plugins/DAP-WP-LiveLinks plugin’s folder name (add an underscore at the beginning or the end) so that your site can load.

————————————————————

(8) PHP Notice: Undefined index

You are seeing errors like this on your site…

PHP Notice: Undefined index: HTTP_HOST in /var/www/my/site/httpdocs/dap/dap-settings.php on line 108
PHP Notice: Undefined index: HTTP_HOST in /var/www/my/site/httpdocs/dap/dap-settings.php on line 110
PHP Strict Standards: Only variables should be passed by reference in /var/www/my/site/httpdocs/dap/inc/classes/Dap_User.class.php on line 272

It’s probably because the PHP error reporting has been set to “Strict” on your server.

Just paste the following line of code towards the top of the dap/dap-config.php file, right after the PHP opening tag (“<?php”)

error_reporting(0);

That should resolve this issue.

16

Protecting An Entire WordPress Category

You can protect an entire WordPress “Category” in your WP blog, simply by adding the “Permalink” of that category to a “Product”, just like you would protect the permalink of a blog post or page.

Please note that on the DAP Product page, you will only see the permalinks to Pages and Posts, not Categories. So the category permalink is something you would have to figure out (it’s very easy) as shown below, and then directly add that permalink to the DAP Product.

Figuring Out The Category Permalink

So, browse to your blog in your browser, visit the category that you wish to protect on your blog.

If your blog is in the root, it will look like….

http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/category/my-category-name/

If your blog is in a sub-folder called, say, “blog”, then the link will look like…

http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/blog/category/my-category-name/

So copy the link that you see in your browser (this is the “permalink” for that category), log in as DAP Admin, and add it to one of your products. That’s it.

Just protecting the category will protect all posts assigned to that category, be it posts that were already assigned to it, or posts that you will be creating in the future and assigning to that category.

IMPORTANT

When you add an entire category of posts to DAP, then all posts in that category – posts currently in that category, as well posts you will be adding in the future under that category – will all become automatically protected.

So if you add the entire category to DAP and then configure that “link” to be available on a certain day, or date, then remember that ALL posts within that category will automatically become available on that day or date.

WARNING 1

Also remember that because you are adding an entire category of posts, and not individual posts, you won’t be able to configure individual posts within that category to be dripped at various times. Only the “category” link can be configured to be dripped, and not the individual posts within it.

ALTERNATIVE

Please note that when you protect a category in DAP, then all posts that are assigned to this category will drip at the same time. It’s not possible to drip the category itself on “Day #X” and then drip the posts within on different days. It’s ALL OR NOTHING when it comes to category protection.

So if you want a much more tighter control on the dripping, then better to use Pages and Sub-Pages in WordPress.

Since you would anyway need to set up a dripping “day” for each piece of content, it is actually highly recommended that you drip them as Pages and not posts.

So let’s say you create 3 pages:

http://yoursite.com/Month-01
http://yoursite.com/Month-02
http://yoursite.com/Month-03

Then there would be sub-pages (Pages which have above Pages as the Parent) under each of these, like…

http://yoursite.com/Month-01/Week-01
http://yoursite.com/Month-01/Week-02
http://yoursite.com/Month-01/Week-03

Etc.
So then you can drip a Page on Day #1 (say), and then drip the sub-pages on Day #2, #3, etc.

That’s the easiest, best and most convenient set up, especially if you want a great deal of control over the dripping, and also don’t want anyone to see even any links or hints regarding what else is coming.

IMPORTANT

If you do category protection, then you MUST use a custom error page. So basically, create a custom error page – like http://YourSite.com/error/ – and then use that as the “Error Page URL” of the product under which you’ve protected the category, and also the Error-Page URL (Global) under setup config.

Troubleshooting

If you protect a category, and you can still access all of the posts assigned to that category, then it could mean…

1) You are already logged in as a user who does have authorized access to the product under which the category is protected. Or,

2) It means you have turned on “Sneak-Peek” but haven’t inserted any more tags into your posts, so the entire posts are showing up unrestricted. In which case, you will either need to turn off Sneak-Peek, or keep sneak-peek on and insert more tags into all of your posts.

47

Creating Member Profile, My Content & Affiliate Sections within WordPress

Creating Your “Member’s Area”

DAP has 4 main Member-facing pages (the rest of your content is all standard WordPress pages and posts and categories, along with your media – like Videos, PDF reports, etc.):

• Login page: This is where your members would log in at. (You, the DAP Admin don’t have to log in from here – you can log in to DAP admin when you log in to the WordPress admin dashboard.) This member login page can be either a stand-alone log in page (if you put the tag on a separate page), or it can be a a login form on the sidebar (that turns in to a logout button once they log in).
• My Content: This section shows all the products that the member has purchased or signed up for. This is the page that shows the links newly appearing as and when they are dripped on the member.
• My Profile: This shows all of the user profile fields – like first name, last name, email, password, address, etc. They can change all of their contact information on this page.
• Affiliate Info: This shows members their own personalized affiliate link, their link-referral stats, commissions earned, commissions paid, etc. If you want to make this page even more useful, you can add banners and emails and promo copy that the affiliate can simply copy/paste and send to their list.

So basically, only 4 “member” pages as far as DAP is concerned.

And all of these can be created right within your WordPress site, within a WP Page, so that they take on the exact same look & feel as your web site.

• “Login” page: Use [DAPLoginForm] (responsive)
  (used to be %%LOGIN_FORM%%)
• “My Content” (shows the user’s own products): Use [DAPMyContent] (responsive)
  (instead of the old [DAPUserLinks] or %%USERLINKS%%)
• “My Profile” (username/password): Use [DAPUserProfile] (responsive version coming soon)
  (used to be %%USERPROFILE%%)
• “Affiliate Info” Section: Use %%AFFDETAILS%% (responsive version coming soon)
  

Login Page within WordPress

Now DAP already provides you with a built-in, out-of-the-box login form, at YourSite.com/dap/login.php . But if you want to put this form “within” your WordPress blog, so as to give your login form the same Look & Feel as the rest of your blog, then do this…

1) Create a WordPress Page (not “Post”) with the text [DAPLoginForm] in the body of the page, and a title of say, Login, and save the new page. If you used the text “Login” for the title, then the actual link to this page would be YourSite.com/blog/login

2) This page now shows up as “Login” along with the rest of your “pages” on your blog.

3) Go to DAP Admin > Setup > Config . Scroll down to the field Login URL.

In the text box, enter the full link to your login page from Step 1:
http://YourSite.com/blog/login/

Or if your blog is in the root, then…
http://YourSite.com/login

That’s it! When someone clicks on the “Login” link that now shows in your “Pages” menu, they will now see a nicely formatted login form.

Related: Where is the Logout Link?

Creating The Member’s Area

• “My Content” section – use the merge tag [DAPMyContent]
• “My Profile” (username/password) – merge tag [DAPUserProfile]
• “Affiliate Info” Section – merge tag %%AFFDETAILS%%

Create a separate page for each of the tags.

Creating a “My Content” Page within WordPress

This is the page that shows all of a member’s content details – like what products the user has purchased, what are the access start and end dates for that purchase, and all of the content within each product – all separately organized.

To create such a page, simply create a WordPress “Page” (not ‘post’) with the title “My Content”  (for example) and within the body of the page, enter the text [DAPMyContent] and save the new page. Now if you visit the page, and you are logged in, it will show you something similar to the image below.

And if you gave this page the title of “My Content”, then the actual link to this page would be YourSite.com/blog/my-content/

Starting DAP 4.8, this tag generates a responsive template. See the full details at http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/blog/2015/03/responsive-login-templates/

Creating a “My Profile” Page within WordPress

This is the section that shows the user’s profile information, where they can change their name, email id, address and other details.

For this, create a WordPress Page (not ‘post’) with the text [DAPUserProfile] in the body of the page, and a title of say, User Profile (or) My Profile and save the new page.

If you used the text “User Profile” for the title, then the actual link to this page would be YourSite.com/blog/user-profile/

Creating an “My Affiliate Info” Page within WordPress

This is the page that shows your users their affiliate link (which is instantly created for them upon purchasing any product on your site), link clicks, referrer details, earnings and payments.

For this, create a WordPress Page (not ‘post’) with the text %%AFFDETAILS%% in the body of the page, and a title of say, Affiliate, and save the new page.

If you used the text “Affiliates” for the title, then the actual link to this page would be YourSite.com/blog/affiliates/

That’s it!

Now if you want to make the affiliate page more powerful by creating a “ready-made affiliate toolbox” for your affiliates, then see this: Creating an Affiliate Toolbox

22

Protecting Files

DAP File Protection

DAP is one of the few membership plugins that can protect all kinds of web site files on your web site. But this feature comes with a few caveats. Read this page completely before you decide.

DAP can protects files “in-place” – meaning, the exact same files that will actually be accessed by your members when they’re eligible to.

Most other membership plugins resort to all sorts of “gimmicks” – like hiding the real location of the main file, cloaking it, trying to obfuscate the link, etc.

Not only is it a inefficient way of securing files, but it’s also extremely insecure.

On top of that, with other membership plugins, you cannot send protected links via email, because that would then give away the location of the true file, which they are not protecting.

DAP is among the very, very few membership plugins that protect files in place, which means even if the true location of the file is passed around by your members to their non-member friends, the file cannot be accessed without having to log in first with a valid member account that is actually eligible to access that file.

DAP provides the ultimate security for your files – and ultimate peace of mind for you – like no other plugin can, knowing that your content can never be illegally shared online with un-authorized users.

And DAP can protect any kind of file – including videos, audio, images, reports, zip files, even Javascript files – with any kind of extension: like .pdf, .doc, .zip, .jpg. .js, .mp3, .mp4, .mov., etc etc.

RECOMMENDED: Amazon S3 File Storage

Highly Recommended

The ideal and best way to store files is to store them on Amazon S3, and then use a plugin like our own S3MediaVault.com to insert secure, expiring links to those files within your WordPress pages. That way, the page itself is protected by DAP, your files on Amazon S3 are protected by the S3MediaVault plugin, and you have two layers of protection for your content.

If you decide to store your files on Amazon S3, then ignore the rest of this article, and head over to Storing files on Amazon vs your Webhost

The steps below are only useful if you are going to use all of your files on your own web hosting account – which is not ideal and is not recommended.

Section I: Protecting Files Under WordPress

This is the easiest way to protect files on your server, in DAP.

1) Upload them to your WordPress blog when you are writing a new post. All such files will be stored in a folder called “wp-content/uploads/….“.

For large files, you could simply upload them directly using FTP, directly into the “wp-content/uploads/” folder and DAP is configured right off-the-shelf to “look” for any file inside the “wp-content/uploads/” folder. But once the file is under the “wp-content/uploads/…” folder (either directly under it, or under a sub-folder, like wp-content/uploads/videos/), you will now still need to let DAP know that this file is to be protected as part of a Product.

NOTE: You DO NOT have to upload files using the WP file uploader (like some of our competitors force you to do!). You can use regular, plain ol’ FTP, using a client like FileZilla or CuteFTP, or your webhost cPanel’s FTP feature.

2) Go to the product you wish to protect the file as part of, and then scroll down to the “ContentResponder” section.

2.1) If you know (or can figure out) the full URL to your file – like http://www.YourSite.com/wp-content/uploads/coolreport.pdf – you can simply paste that directly into the field “A” (in the image below)

2.2) Or, if you can’t figure out the full URL, then you can enter “wp-content” (if your blog is directly in your root folder) – or “blog” or “members” (if your blog is not in your root, and is in a sub-folder) into field “B” below, and then click on “Load Files”, and it will show you all files under that folder. And you will be able to scroll through and look for your file. And there click on the “Add” link right next to that file name you wish to protect.

Once you do (2.1) or (2.2) above, the file will get added to the Product, and will now be protected.

Section 2: Protecting Files Outside of WordPress

This is NOT RECOMMENDED, unless you are technical and you know what you’re doing.

There is a one-time setup process involved, if you wish to protect files outside of your WordPress directory.

1. You need to add the following code to the .htaccess in the root of your web site. So, in your web site’s root folder (where you have your home page – like index.php or index.html for example)…

i) if you already have an existing .htaccess file there, then just open it, COPY the text from below and PASTE it at the very end of this file.

ii) If there is no .htaccess in your root folder, then create one, and then open it, COPY the text from below and PASTE it at the very end of this file.

NOTE: BE SURE TO MAKE A BACK-UP OF YOUR EXISTING .htaccess FILE FIRST


#Paste this at the very end of your .htaccess file
#in your web site's root folder

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
#dap
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !dapclient.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/dap/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !(.*)(\.php|\.css|\.js|\.jpg|\.gif|\.png|\.txt)$
RewriteRule (.*) /dap/client/website/dapclient.php?dapref=/$1&plug=wp&%{QUERY_STRING} [L] </IfModule>

 

Doing the above enables file protection for files outside your WordPress installation folders.

2) Now go to the DAP Product you wish to protect the file as part of, and then scroll down to the “ContentResponder” section. Then…

• If you know the full URL to your file – like http://www.YourSite.com/reports/coolreport.pdf – you could simply paste that directly into the field “A” from the image above (make sure you “visit” this URL first and verify that there is actually such a file at this link)
• OR… if you can’t figure out the full URL, then you can enter the text “reports” (the name of your top-level folder where your file is) into field “B” from the image above, and then click on “Load Files”, and it will show you all files under that folder. And you will be able to scroll through and look for your file. And there click on the “Add” link right next to that file name you wish to protect.

The file is then added to the Product, and will now be protected as part of that Product.

That’s it.

Testing File Protection

Open a different browser (not different window – a totally different browser – like, if you’re logged in as DAP admin in FireFox, then open IE)  and try to access your file directly and see if DAP redirects you to the login screen.

If not, take a deep breath – it’s NOT DAP 🙂

It’s just that you probably missed something during the setup.

Revisit the steps above, and if you still can’t figure it out, you might want to think about uploading the file to Amazon S3.

This feature can be hit-or-miss depending on server software, PHP version, security software on your server, etc. So if it works, then great.

If it doesn’t work, then it is specific to your server. So if you want us to log in to your site and troubleshoot this, if you are a Platinum member, we can do this for free.

And if you’re not a Platinum member, you will have to purchase a premium support slot in order for us to log in to your site and troubleshoot this.

So while you can try it and see if it works, especially if you’re protecting just a couple of ebooks and reports, if it doesn’t work, then it’s in your best interest for the long-term, to switch to Amazon S3 for hosting your premium files.

Recommended Reading

If you have a number of large files to deliver to your members, then you should consider hosting your files on Amazon S3. And here’s why…

6

Upgrading to the latest version of LiveLinks

1. DO NOT DELETE your DAP-WP-LiveLinks folder.
2. DO NOT DISABLE or DE-ACTIVATE the DAP-WP-LiveLinks plugin.
3. If you wish to make a back up of your existing DAP-WP-LiveLinks folder, DO NOT DO IT in the same folder, as WP will treat it as a duplicate copy of the plugin, and you can have unexpected results. If you wish to take a backup, then download it to your computer, or move it away from the wp-content/plugins/ folder. DO NOT KEEP more than one copy of the LiveLinks plugin files in the wp-content/plugins/ folder
4. Download the latest version of DAP-WP-LiveLinks.zip from the members area.
   
5. Unzip the zip file to your desktop.This will create a folder by name DAP-WP-LiveLinks on your desktop.
6. Simply Upload the entire DAP-WP-LiveLinks folder (including the folder too) to your WordPress plugins directory (which is wp-content/plugins/). You are essentially over-writing your existing plugin files, that's all.

That's it!

Note: The above ALL-CAPS, that too in RED does not mean we're yelling at you :-). We just want to OVER-EMPHASIZE the importance of the text, that's all.

31

Upgrading to the latest version of DAP

UPDATE: Use the new DAP Easy Installer plugin to upgrade DAP, and skip the old method below.
__________________________________

The following is relevant to you only if you are “Upgrading” DAP from an earlier version. (What’s new?)

Here’s how to upgrade to the new version:

1. DO NOT DELETE your existing dap folder on your web site.
2. DO NOT DELETE your DAP-WP-LiveLinks folder.
3. DO NOT DISABLE or DE-ACTIVATE the DAP-WP-LiveLinks plugin.
4. YOU MUST LOG IN TO WORDPRESS ADMIN and click on on the “DigitalAccessPass” link and load up the DAP Admin home page before proceeding.
5. Upgrading DAP:
   Download the zip file dap_vXX.zip (where XX stands for whatever version you are upgrading to) from the member’s area and unzip to desktop. You should now see a folder by the name “dap” on your desktop.
6. OVERWRITE the entire contents of the “dap” folder on your web site, with the contents of the new “dap” folder on your desktop.
7. Upgrading the DAP-WP-LiveLinks Plugin:
   If you wish to make a back up of your existing DAP-WP-LiveLinks folder, DO NOT DO IT in the same folder, as WP will treat it as a duplicate copy of the plugin, and you could have unexpected results. If you wish to take a backup, then download it to your computer, or move it away from the wp-content/plugins/ folder. DO NOT KEEP more than one copy of the DAP-WP-LiveLinks plugin files (even if you rename them) in the wp-content/plugins/ folder
8. Download the latest version of DAP-WP-LiveLinks_vYY.zip from the members area.
   
9. Unzip the zip file to your desktop.This will create a folder by name DAP-WP-LiveLinks on your desktop.
10. Simply Upload the entire DAP-WP-LiveLinks folder (including the folder too) to your WordPress plugins directory (which is wp-content/plugins/). You are essentially over-writing your existing plugin files, that’s all.
11. Now go back to your WordPress admin page where you have the DAP admin panel already loaded and visible.
12. If you’re not already viewing the DAP admin home page, then click on the DigitalAccessPass link in the WP admin menu towards the bottom left of your screen.
13. You will now see a mostly-white-background page that shows you your current version of DAP and the version being upgraded to. And you will see a link that you need to click on, in order to upgrade your installation to the newest version you just uploaded. Just click on that link, and it should say “Successfully installed…”.
14. CRITICAL: Once you are logged in as DAP Admin, click on the “Welcome, <admin name>” link towards the top left of your DAP admin panel (shown on all DAP admin pages). That will take you to the user edit page for your own DAP admin account. You MUST change your password now – even if it is to the same password as what you had before.

Note: The above ALL-CAPS, that too in RED does not mean we’re yelling at you :-). We just want to OVER-EMPHASIZE the importance of the text, that’s all.