Entries Tagged 'Access Control' ↓

DAP Login Xpress

What Is “Login Xpress”?

“Login Xpress” is a DAP feature that enables your members to be logged right into your membership site immediately upon completion of their purchase.

This is roughly how it works:

  • Visitor arrives at your web site
  • On your sales page, they click on any “Buy” button to purchase a Product (or Membership Level)
  • They’re taken to the checkout page (depending on Payment processor being used) and they enter their payment information and hit “Submit”
  • When they hit “Submit” to complete their payment, their payment is processed right away, and the buyer is immediately transferred back to your web site, in real time, and automatically logged in to your membership site, and they are taken to the “Welcome” page or “Members” page (you may choose what this page is going to be at a per-Product level)

Payment Processors That Work With Login Xpress

DAP supports this feature with the following payment processors:

  • Paypal Standard (DAP-generated buttons only – will not work with Paypal-hosted buy buttons that you generate from within your Paypal account)
  • 1Shoppingcart / 1SiteAutomation.com
  • Authorize.net

If you use any of the payment options above, then you can set up your sales funnel in such a way that buyers are logged in right away immediately after purchase.

Payment Processors That DO NOT Work With Login Xpress (Yet)

  • Paypal Website Payments Pro
  • ClickBank
  • e-Junkie
  • WorldPay

DAP integrates with the above processors via some kind of “back-end payment notification” – similar to Paypal’s “IPN” (Instant Payment Notification). Which means the notification between the payment processor and DAP on your site only happens on the “back-end”. Which is why DAP can only deliver the login details to the buyer via an email, and cannot log them in right away (like it can do with “Login Xpress”), because the buyer’s information is available to DAP only when the payment processor sends out the IPN notification behind-the-scenes, so to speak.

So if you’re using the above processors to accept online payments, then what you need to do, is to redirect your buyers to a static “Thank You” page that has a message similar to the one below…

“Thank you for your purchase. In a few minutes, please check your email address used during purchase for your log in details to log in to the members’ area and access the product you just purchased.”

And behind the scenes, DAP would’ve already received the payment notification from the payment processor, and it would’ve created an account for your buyer, given them access to the purchased product, and sent them the “Thank-you Email” for the product(s).

Give Existing Users Access To A Product

This flow is only for giving access to an existing User to a Product. If you wish to add a new user manually to the system, then see this post.

  1. Go to the Users > Manage screen.
  2. Search for the user by email id (or last name, user id, etc)
  3. Once you have found their information, check the check box in the first column next to their user id
  4. Then using the drop-downs in the top-right section, give them access to the new Product
  5. They’re initially added as a “Free” user by default. You may mark them as “PAID” if you want to have access to the product just like an actual paying member would.

Troubleshooting DAP/WordPress Sync

The problem:   DAP users are not being “sync”ed to WordPress.

Here’s how to troubleshoot.

What are your sync options in DAP Admin -> Setup -> Config  -> WordPress Related Section?

Do you allow all users to be sync’d or just paid users?
Do you allow users to be synced only when they pick a username?

If you allow all users to be sync’d and do not want to force your users to pick a username before dap syncs to WP, then use these settings:

Sync DAP User Data to WordPress “Y”
Sync Paid Users Only “N”
Sync Only if Username Exists in DAP “N”

To test:
1) Add a user manually to DAP via dap admin panel
2) Note down the user’s dap login id/password
3) Open a new browser where you are not logged in to DAP as admin
4) Now login to DAP again but this time as the user you created in step 1.
5) Now visit any part of your blog. DAP will now sync user to WP.
6) Login to WP admin panel. Click on Users in the left sidebar and see if the new user was created.

Content Protection, Security and DRM

We frequently get asked questions like…

“Can DAP protect my Videos/PDF’s/Audio files from being copied? Is there some kind of tracking that I can build into my videos that will let me track the video on torrent sites?”

“Can DAP prevent people from downloading my videos/audio/pdf and uploading it to a torrent or third-party site?”

“Can DAP force people to only watch my videos online? I don’t want my members to download any of my content to their hard disk – I want to force them to see/read/hear/watch everything online.”

Short Answer: No.

Long Answer: Keep reading…

The Nitty-Gritty

There are so many ways to steal your content from your web site – no matter what technology you use.

Let us explain what that means…

1) Let’s say you implement a technology where only paying members can even get to your videos. Like you can already do with DAP. So then a paying member can download your video because they are already a paying member, and they actually have access to the videos. And once your video has been downloaded to their hard disk, you have lost all control over it – no matter what anyone tells you, that’s the truth. Because they can upload it to any illegal warez sharing site, and there’s nothing you can do about it.

Of course, you could spend all your time, money and efforts monitoring the thousands of illegal sharing sites whether your video or ebook is found anywhere – assuming you can even find it in the first place, which would be like finding a needle in a hay stack – no, make that “hay factory” – wait, make that “finding a needle in New York City” – and then write to those site owners and ask them to take it down.

Or you could focus on the 99% of legitimate members of your site, and create great content for them, and keep them paying month after month, and sell more products to them, and keep them happy.

2) Let’s say you use a plugin that only allows true-streaming – like one based on Amazon CloudFront technology, that will not allow the users to directly download your videos, but force them to watch online only. Then there’s any number of “screen-capture” tools – even free ones – that your members can use to capture another video of your video, and then share it with their friends, or upload to illegal sharing sites.

The list goes on and on. No matter how hard you make it, there’s always going to be a way around.

So, unless you’re a NASA, NetFlix, or Amazon or Apple who has a real reason to protect their content that is worth real millions of dollars, there is *no technology* available today that will let you track a video or pdf *after* it has been downloaded. If someone is saying they can do this, then they’re outright lying to you, and playing on your fears.

DAP already has a built-in password-sharing prevention security built in. If someone tries to share their account info with others, DAP will lock their account the moment their account gets log-ins from multiple IP’s (you can configure this setting) and deny further access to any of their content, until you investigate the user and “un-lock” their account.

DAP already protects all of your media from illegal access.

DAP also prevents your Amazon S3 videos and audio and other content from being accessed by anyone directly. Using a script like http://S3MediaVault.com , you can make it such that your videos and audio and other media can only be downloaded from approved sites (where the plugin is installed), and then on top of that, there’s DAP already sitting like a monster watch-dog, making sure only authorized users can even get into the site in the first place.

So hope that helps if you’ve gotten too worried about protecting your content – so worried that you’re missing the big picture.

Don’t Forget What Is Important (Hint: It starts with “Mem” and ends with “bers”)

The best membership sites allow people to consume the content they’ve paid for in multiple ways – view the video, download the video, download mp3 audio version of the video, download the presentation as a powerpoint, download the transcripts as a PDF, and so on.

Instead of making it easy for your members to download the content, if you’re going to spend your limited resources trying to figure out how to prevent people from downloading content that they’ve actually paid for, and force people to only view your content online and not be able to view it offline (like in their spare time or when going for a jog in the park), you run the risk of upsetting 99% of your legitimate paying members, in order to secure your content from the 1% of pirates, who will steal and share your content no matter what.

So forget about the 1%, and focus on the 99%. DAP already has enough security in place to stop the 1%. So don’t worry about that. Your content is very secure with DAP.

Anything else is just a total waste of your time. So don’t get distracted by the noise, and just get on with the real important tasks on hand: Building a long-term recurring income stream by building a large community of highly satisfied, loyal fans who are thrilled about what you have to offer, and will continue to pay month after month because whatever it is that you’re selling, is making their life better in some way.

The hardest thing to do online, with a membership site is still this: Creating great content, Attracting buyers, and then getting your members to keep paying month after month.

And that, is the big picture.

Un-Protecting Content

Once a post or page is added to ANY DAP product, then it becomes protected, and will be available to only those who have authorized access to that Product.

So to completely Un-protect a page or post that you have protected previously, and make it “public” (a.k.a “open”) again, so that any casual visitor to your blog or web site can see it, you just scroll to the right in the “Protected Content” section, and click on the “X” image next to the content that you wish to Un-protect.

Of course, also make sure that you do the same for all products – because if you forget to delete it from even one Product, then it will continue to remain protected.

Protect Entire Blog

If you, for some reason, need to protect your ENTIRE blog from “non-logged in users” – meaning, any part of your blog (menus, sidebars, widgets, etc), including the un-protected pages, should be seen only by someone who is already logged in – be it a free user or a paid user, then here’s how you do it…

  1. Go into your WordPress Admin, click on Appearance > Editor
  2. Make sure your current theme is selected in the drop-down towards the right/top corner.
  3. Click on “Header” (header.php) of your theme.
  4. Enter the following text right towards the very top of that file.

<?php
include_once “./dap/dap-config.php”;

if( !Dap_Session::isLoggedIn() ) {
header(“Location: /dap/login.php”);
exit;
}
?>

The only thing you need to make sure is that you have the path to the dap-config.php correct.

If your blog is in the root, then use the code above as is.

If your blog is in a sub-folder, then replace line in red above, with the line in red below…

include_once “../dap/dap-config.php”;

That’s it!


WARNING

Please remember that if you do this, then you must use the default DAP login page /dap/login.php , and you won’t be able to put the login form within WordPress.

The reason for this, is that the protection code is being applied at the theme level, and the protection will also apply to all WordPress pages and posts – and if you put the DAP login form inside a WP page, then that page will also get protected from everyone, and no one will even be able to get to the login form in order to log in. That makes your site impossible to log in to, which of course makes no sense.

DAP Shortcodes

Starting v4.0, DAP now has a new feature called “DAP Shortcodes”.

This basically allows you to do partial content protection.

So if you had a blog post or page with 3 paragraphs of text and a video, you can protect just the video from certain groups of viewers, and leave the text portions open for anyone to read.

It’s a “Teaser On Steroids“.

This may be used to quickly protect content that you don’t necessarily wish to create a DAP Product for, just for the sake of protecting it.

So if you don’t care about dripping some content, but just wish to protect it from say, non-members, or make it available only to certain “levels”, then you can do it by using the DAP Shortcode, and not have to worry about adding it to any particular level first.

These Shortcodes may or may not be used within content that is already protected as part of a DAP Product. Totally up to you.

Basic DAP Shortcode

[DAP]…private content…[/DAP]

This is the shortest version of the DAP Shortcode. In this version, anything you put between the [DAP] and [/DAP] tags, will be viewable only by a logged-in user.

No other restrictions for the content to be viewed, except that the viewer has to be logged in to your membership site (via DAP). So basically all free and paid members, regardless of which product they have access to, regardless of whether their product access is active or expired, can view the private content.

Full DAP Shortcode

[DAP isPaidUser="Y" hasAccessTo="1,2,3" errMsgTemplate="SHORT"]…private…[/DAP]

This is the full version of the DAP Shortcode. All inner tags – isPaidUser , hasAccessTo and errMsgTemplate – are all OPTIONAL.

isPaidUser: Can be “Y” or “N”. NOT mandatory and may be completely skipped. If skipped, then default is “N”. So DAP ignores whether user is free or paid – which means ALL users regardless of payment status.

hasAccessTo: Comma-separated list of one or more Product Id’s that you want the user to have access to before they can view the content. So if you enter 3 different product id’s (like hasAccessTo=”2,7,14″) it means “Anyone with access to AT LEAST ONE of those products with the product Id’s 2, 17 or 14. It does NOT mean they have to have access to all of them at once. Access to any one is fine.

errMsgTemplate: This determines the HTML/text of the error message displayed, if user DOES NOT have access to the content being protected.

Values may be Can be SHORT, LONG or “” (empty). NOT mandatory. If omitted entirely from the tag, then the default template used is SHORT.

If you want no error message to be displayed, and want the protected content to silently disappear completely if user does not have access to it, then include the tag, but set it to “” (blank/empty), like this…

[DAP errMsgTemplate=""]…private…[/DAP]

The HTML/text displayed by the SHORT and LONG templates can be configured via the Setup > Templates screen, as shown below.

Examples

[DAP]…private content…[/DAP]

Viewable by Any Logged-in User

[DAP isPaidUser="Y"]…private…[/DAP]

Viewable by ANY logged in user who is also a PAID user of ANY product. Use SHORT error template by default as none is specified.

[DAP isPaidUser="Y" hasAccessTo="1" errMsgTemplate="SHORT"]…private…[/DAP]

Viewable by ANY logged in user who is also a PAID user of the product with the ID “1″ (you can get the Product id from the “Products > Manage” screen). Display HTML/text from the SHORT template if user does not have access to the private content.

[DAP isPaidUser="N" hasAccessTo="1,2,3" errMsgTemplate="LONG"]…private…[/DAP]

Viewable by ANY logged in user (FREE or PAID – doesn’t matter) who has access to EITHER of the Products – 1, 2 or 3. Display HTML/text from the LONG template if user does not have access to the private content.

Member-Specific Content

“For Your Eyes Only”
Let’s say you run a coaching program. You have 10 clients. You want Joe Customer to see a tailor-made custom video meant only for Joe, and Jill Member to see a specific PDF report written specifically for Jill’s business. Now using the new “userId” parameter in the DAP shortcode, you can now protect a piece of content so that only a specific DAP user can see it.

[DAP userId="144"]protected content[/DAP]

In-Page Dripping

DAP Shortcodes now include the ability to specify a “Day” right within the shortcode itself. So you can now publish, say, 10 videos on one page, and you can enclose each video’s embed code with a separate DAP Shortcode that has a different “Day” setting, so the very same page will show 1 video on Day 1, 2 videos on Day 2, 3 videos on Day 3, and so on.

Like this…

[DAP day="1" hasAccessTo="1"]Video 1 Embed Code[/DAP]

[DAP day="2" hasAccessTo="1"]Video 2 Embed Code[/DAP]

[DAP day="3" hasAccessTo="1"]Video 3 Embed Code[/DAP]

NOTE: Please remember that you may not omit the hasAccessTo field – you must use the hasAccessTo field to specify a product id, because all start “days” for a user are associated with a product.

Hiding Content From Logged-In Members

Starting DAP v4.1, you can now mark content such that it will NOT be displayed to members who ARE logged in. To put it another way, it will HIDE content from members, and show it ONLY to NON-Members.

For example, this could be your sales copy or your buy-button, that you don’t want your logged in members (who may have already purchased the product) to see.

Here’s the shortcode for that.

[DAP isLoggedIn="N"]….content to show only to NON-members… [/DAP]

User & Product Statuses

DAP assigns a status for the User itself (at a global, account level), as well as a User/Product level (specific to the user's access to that product).

So there's the User Status and then the User/Product Status

For eg., the User Status may be "Active", but a specific User/Product status may be "Inactive" – which means user can log in to their account, receive emails, etc, but cannot access any content that is part of this specific product (though they can access all other products they may have, that are "Active").

The bottom-line is this: In order for a user to access his/her account, and all the content in the Products that he/she's purchased, all the statuses have to be Active.

So here are the possible statuses, and what they mean.

User Status

These statuses apply to the User's account itself.

Inactive

If the user's status is inactive, then that means the user's entire account is inactive. User will not be able to even log in to their account. All outgoing broadcast and autoresponder emails will "exclude" them from the list, and they will not receive any emails from the system.

Active

Account is accessible, all emails are being sent.

Unconfirmed

They've just signed up for a product that requires "Double Optin". Which means, unless they "confirm" by clicking on the double-optin link, their account will not become active. Please note that once a user has already confirmed the double-optin link for one product, then their "User" status automatically becomes "Active". So even if they go on to sign up for another double-optin product, then their User status will never again change to "Unconfirmed" (unless specifically set so by the DAP Admin). For all future double-optin products, it is this user's "User/Product" status that will be "Unconfirmed", while the main "User" status remains "Active".

 

Locked

When an account receives login attempts from more than the number of IP addresses set in the "Setup > Config > Advanced > Max. # of User Logins From Different IP`s" field, then that user's main User status is changed to be "Locked". This is very similar to the "Inactive" status, except named different just so admin can distinguish between "Locked" and other users.

 

User/Product Status

These statuses specifically apply to a User's access with relation to a specific Product.

Inactive

User cannot access any content that is part of this product. However, User may access other products whose user/product status is "Active".

Active

There are no restrictions for this User to access content that is part of this product (of course, only whatever the user is eligible to see, based on the drip setup).

vBulletin Integration

Click Here for detailed vBulletin -> DAP setup instructions.

Click Here for DAP->vBulletin integration FAQ/Usecases

Video 1: DAP/vBulletin Integration


Video 2: Demo of vBulletin Integration


Product/Forum Chaining

This is by far the most exciting feature in 3.9. I don’t think even we, the developers of DAP, have been this excited about a new feature.

Now, with just a few clicks of the mouse, you can completely automate your Forum management, and do some really slick stuff like…

* “Silver” Members get posting access only to the following vB forums…
– Introductions
– General Discussions

* “Gold” members get access to all above, plus the forum “Puppy Potty Training Tips”. So they get access to the following vB forums…
– Introductions
– General Discussions
– Puppy Potty Training Tips

* “Platinum” members get access to ALL of the forums above, PLUS some premium forums, like “Joint Ventures”, “Starting Your Own Dog Business”, “Premium Support”, and more. So they get access to…
– Introductions
– General Discussions
– Puppy Potty Training Tips
– Joint Ventures
– Platinum Mastermind
– Starting Your Own Dog Business
– Premium Support

And then you can add some more rules like…

Both Gold & Silver can just VIEW the “Premium Support” forums, but cannot POST anything.

And Gold & Silver CANNOT even VIEW the “Joint Ventures”, “Platinum Mastermind”, “Starting Your Own Dog Business”.

See how insanely powerful this can get?

Sure, you could have a forum with WP-based forum plugins like bbPress and Simple:Press too.

But comparing those WP forums to vBulletin? That’s like putting a kid who’s just completed one month of boxing lessons, in a ring with Mike Tyson right after someone said something mean about his mother!

And can you imagine what it would do to your “retention rate”, when you tell your members that if they cancel their subscription, they will lose access to the entire community of like minded people?

And to think that we’re just scratching the surface of monetizing forums here.

The vBulletin forum software is so rich in rules and user roles, and the DAP integration with vB is so tight that you could start just a “Forums Only” membership site and charge just for access to your forums!

Imagine creating a one-time product where for $10, they get to post in a “Special Offers” forum where they can advertise their product or service?

Or how about charging $10 to post in a forum called “Outsourcing”, where they can advertise their need to hire someone either for both long-term and short-term projects? It would be free to view for everyone, but you have to pay-to-post]

- Veena Prashanth
Co-Founder & Co-Developer, DAP

Order Of Links On “My Links” page

Ordering by Drip Day

The easiest way to organize links, is to set the dripping “day” for each link.

So if you’re setting up 5 links to be available on Day #1, 2, 3,4 & 5, then in the “My Links” section, DAP will display the links in “Newest On Top” order.

So the newest link (Day #5) will appear first, followed by Day #4, and so on, until Day #1.

Ordering When There’s No Dripping

If you have multiple links that you’re making available all on the same day (like all on Day #1), then the ordering is going to be exactly like what you see on the DAP Product page.

If you see the links order in the above screenshot, that’s the exact same order in which the links will appear when the member views their “My Links” page (or whatever you have called the links page).

There’s currently no way to do any other custom ordering of links other than what’s specified above. But we do have it on our To-Do list to make the ordering configurable. Hopefully, we’ll get to it in a future version.

And if’s absolutely important to you, and you can’t wait till we get to it on our own, then you can always pay to have it custom developed for you. Please contact us via email for a quote.