Don't forget to watch in "Full Screen" mode

Ok, so did you see all of the amazing new 4.2 features in the above video? Very cool, eh?

Anyway, here's why things have been kinda quiet in the DAP world…

DAP v4.1 Is Final

DAP v4.1 is now officially "Final". It has been very stable for over a month now, but we were just holding ground in case any bugs get reported. So unless you've downloaded DAP in the last couple of weeks. better to re-download DAP v4.1 and LiveLinks v1.6 again, and upload them to your site. (Upgrading Your DAP Installation)

DAP v4.2 Is Coming Soon Now Here!

In less than 2 weeks, actually.

And here are all the features that are included…

• [NEW] Shopping Cart "Check Out Page" can now be placed right inside WordPress pages using new merge code %%DAPCART%% , thus taking on the instant look & feel of your WordPress theme!

• [NEW] Custom Fields (Hooray!): Admin can create new custom fields inside DAP

• [NEW] Ability to customize shopping cart options: Like "Where did you hear about us", "Additional Comments", "Terms & Conditions", etc – on the DAP Cart's Checkout page

• [NEW] Ability to include and customize Product-level Cart header & Cart footer HTML

• [NEW] Complete redesign of the Products page. Now has a tab-based – so basically, the long Products page has now been chopped up into multiple, shorter tabs. The form has also been redesigned to make the Product setup a lot more intuitive and simple

• [NEW] Improvements to "ContentResponder" section: DAP will now highlight (actually, down-play with a dull gray color) all of the blog posts/pages that have already been added to the product being viewed, so you can clearly see which ones are not protected.

• [NEW] Dedicated Buy Button "Generator" Page

• [NEW] Fully re-designed Config page – now you change multiple config items in one go, and click "Update" just once. Better description of fields, better organization of logical groups of configs, etc.

• [NEW] "Help Tips" and "Tool Tips" added to many pages, making things much easier to understand

• [NEW] Cleaner-looking forms and buttons in the DAP Dashboard

• [NEW] "First Name" now part of User Search Criteria

• [NEW] Improved Pagination on Users > Manage page. Eg., when you're on page 4 of the users list, and you take any action on any user on that page, previously DAP used to reset the user search back to Page 1. Now it's been fixed so that it will stay on same page.

• [NEW] Improved "Pop Up" locations: Previously, popups for "Modify Dates" or "Add Affiliate" used to show up all the way on top of the page regardless of how far down you've scrolled on the Users page. Now, the popups will show right next to the clicked link.

• [NEW] Personalized RSS Feed Links: Each of your members will now get their own custom RSS feed link, which they can then enter into their favorite feed reader, like Google Reader or iTunes, and the feed will be customized with only the content that they're eligible to view

• [NEW] Coupons support for Authorize.net

• [NEW] * "Add To Cart" Support for Authorize.net (and possibly Payments Pro too): Which means if you're using the DAP cart & Auth.net, your members will be able to buy multiple products in one purchase

• [FIX] Change to DAP Shortcodes to remove empty breaks and paragraphs when hiding protected content

• [FIX] "Missing spaces from error and notification browser messages" issue fixed

On top of that, there are so many other little tweaks and improvements, that don't merit a mention in the above list, but will make your DAP experience a much smoother one.

Well, that's about it as far as 4.2 is concerned.

As always, don't forget to add your comments below.

Cheers!

- Veena & Ravi

And we've added some very cool new features to this release. So let's get right to the big story…

Self-Service Store (SSS)

This is our big "Magnum Opus" – our "Summer Blockbuster" – released early!!

This is our "Pièce de résistance", our "Coup d'état", our "Tour de force", our "Chef-d'oeu·vre"… (ok, ok, stopping… running out of hyperbole anyway)

But that's how excited we are about this!!! Enough to put 3 exclamation marks in a row!!!

The Self-Service Store (SSS) plugin is a very cool new plugin, that allows you to give "Credits" to your buyers (of a "Master" product), which they can then "Redeem" towards various "Child" Products. It's practically "Content On Demand".

Instead of you dripping content on them in a pre-determined fashion, they choose the modules they want, and the order in which they want them. You just give them the credits, put the power of choice at their fingertips, and get out of the way . Awesome stuff (video further below).

Please note that SSS will only work with 4.1 and above.

Click here to buy the SSS Plugin

MailChimp Integration

DAP now integrates with MailChimp. At a Product level, you can choose if buyers of that Product get added to your MailChimp list. DAP will also "remove" them from your MailChimp list if their access to the Product is removed within DAP.

Internationalization

Hola! Ce qui est très cool ("this is very cool" – in French, no less!).

DAP goes global!

No, we don't mean people from around the world buying DAP – that they already do. We're talking about the new ability to customize the few "Member-Facing" pages in DAP – like "My Content", "My Profile" and "My Affiliate Info" pages – in any non-English language of your choice. We tested with many languages – like Spanish, Dutch, French, and even Chinese! Others will/should work too – as long the language characters are UTF-8 based.

WordPress is already "international" friendly, so we're excited to be able to help membership site creation in multiple languages. And what's really cool, is that you can now also send Autoresponder & Broadcast emails in all of these languages (the last time we checked, even the big-boys like Aweber don't let you do that!).

Admin & Affiliate Reports

There are a few new useful Admin & Affiliate reports.

Admin: On the DAP Admin home page, you will see a few new reports, and enhancements to existing reports. The new "Member Summary" report will show you how many paid users, free users, admin-added and expired users there are. It also gives you a per-Product break-down of these same numbers. And on top of that, you can use the date range to further filter results.

There's also a new "View Performance Summary" report (default report that runs when you visit the "Affiliates > Run Reports" page) that gives you more information for each affiliate – like Clicks generated, Leads, Sales and even Earnings-Per-Click (EPC).

Affiliate: The same affiliate report above is now available to each of your affiliates too. On their affiliate page, they can now see a new table that lists their Clicks, Leads, Sales and EPC.

IPN Script Generator For Developers

DAP now supports the ability to quickly develop support for any 3rd party shopping cart providers that support IPN notification (via HTTP POST) to 3rd party scripts. The DAP admin will have the ability to generate an IPN Script for any 3rd-party shopping cart that support IPN. 

And once the script is generated, you simply upload it to the "dap" folder on your site and update the shopping cart IPN URL settings with the URL of this new script.

New DAP ShortCode Feature

You can now use the DAP ShortCode framework to NOT SHOW a part of your post or page, to anyone WHO IS LOGGED IN.

So, say you wanted your "Sales Copy" and your "Buy Button" to be shown only to visitors, but NOT BE SHOWN to those who are already members, then you can do this.

DAP Plugin Framework

We've created a new "Plugin Framework" for DAP, that developers (and we ourselves) can use to quickly add plugins (even a few-line scripts) to DAP, in order to integrate with other 3rd-party scripts. For example, on a new user-add, you want DAP to pass the member info to a 3rd-party script or application that you are using in addition to DAP. It's not yet as slick as the WordPress plugin framework, but we'll certainly get there sooner than later. In fact, the MailChimp integration is our very first plugin to use this framework.

Miscellaneous Additions

We have a couple of features planned – like one password-generation related feature – which we're going to add to this release before it goes final (a 4.1.1, if you will).

Dog Food v4.1

Yup, we always eat our own dog-food. So we've actually gone ahead and installed v4.1 Beta on this very site – DigitalAccessPass.com . So when you log in to the member's area, you will now see the new "Affiliate Performance Report" that we mentioned above.

The SSS plugin (in its primitive original version from years ago) has always been sold separately. And it will continue to be sold separately.

And once we add the avatar-the-mind-bender-type features to this plugin over the next couple of releases, the price is going to go up – way up.
 

DAP Affiliates: Get Busy!

If you're already a DAP user, then this is THE perfect time to promote DAP.

The last time we offered SSS for free, many of our affiliates made a killing. There's no better bonus for DAP than a real, usable, useful, powerful plugin like SSS.

So get your affiliate toolbox out, and start notifying your lists.

Check Out The Videos

1) SSS Intro

2) SSS Admin Setup

3) SSS User View

MailChimp Integration

Cheers!

- Veena & Ravi

PS: And don't forget to leave a comment below, as alwaySSS

Ok, so here’s what coming in DAP v3.7 and LiveLinks v1.2:

• Complete customization of “protected content” error messages (ones with the DAP lock image)
• Ability to redirect unauthorized users to a custom URL – even to your sales page.
• Redirect to any page on your site – or on any site.
• Separate customizable error messages for logged-in users (who have lost access to expired content, or because they don’t yet have access to it because of the dripping) and non-logged in users
• Put login-form right within the error page. So when someone visits a protected link, DAP will show them something to the effect of “Sorry, you don’t have access… Click here to buy access to this content. Already a member? Log in below…”
• You can customize every last piece of the error message.
• Or you can simply redirect them to a product-specific error page, or even to the product’s sales page if you want.
• TOTAL POWER CUSTOMIZATION! Yay!

Watch the video below and you’ll see what this is all about.

If you’re interested in trying out the beta version, do let us know via the comments below, and we’ll get you the code.

And in the video, you can also see the new “DAP Dashboard”.

All of this will be available for free to all DAP users.

Feel free to comment below.

- Ravi Jayagopal
PS: Oh, one more thing… There’s a new plugin that we will be releasing shortly: Upsell-Tree for regular Paypal accounts. Which means you can now do 1-Click Upsells and Downsells with a regular Paypal account! No merchant account required. How cool is that?

Ok, here’s the video:

And don’t forget to leave your questions, comments or suggestions below.

Now watch this video to see what I’m so excited about…

- Ravi

So in this video, I’ve tried to give you a 20,000-foot overview of how your Web Site, DAP and your Payment Processor all work together to completely automate your membership site.

Oh, and there’s one more video – specifically for those who have just installed DAP, and wondering “Now What?”.

Feel free to comment below after you’ve watched the videos.

DAP: The Big Picture

DAP: It’s Installed. Now What?

- Ravi Jayagopal