If you have a coaching program, or have clients for whom you’re doing custom work (like if you were a CPA or a web designer), and want to publish content that is available to and downloadable only by that client, then there are THREE ways in which you can do Member-Specific Content in DAP.

1) BEST SOLUTION: Using a combination of a special page for each member PLUS DAP’s “For Your Eyes Only” Shortcode

2) Creating Separate Products for each Member

3) Using DAP’s “For Your Eyes Only” Shortcode

Let’s take a look at each one in detail.

1) BEST SOLUTION: Special page for each member PLUS DAP’s “For Your Eyes Only” Shortcode

This is partly manual, partly automated, but is the absolute best solution for multiple reasons, as explained below.

1) For each new member, you would create a separate page. So, for Joe Customer, you would create a new page in WP – http://YourSite.com/joe-customer/

This page would be created after someone has become a member, of course. But creating a WP page for every member will probably take you about what, 30 seconds? So it’s not going to be a big deal (unless you wish to make it one

2) Then, assuming Joe Customer’s “userid” in DAP is 144 (you can find this out on the Users > Manage page). So within the above new page, you would add the following shortcode…

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

(See DAP’s “Member-Specific Content” Shortcodes )

3) You can start adding any amount of private content between the shortcode start and end tags (where you see protected content above).

4) You can use a simple, free plugin like Exclude Pages to make sure the customer’s page http://YourSite.com/joe-customer/ does not show up in any of your menu’s. Even if it did, it’s not like anyone else can see the contents of the page – only Joe Customer – after he’s logged in to DAP – can see the contents of the page. So it’s secure from everyone else.

2) Separate Products for each Member

Here, you would create separate products, one per member – and only give that member access to that product. The advantage here, is that you can protect the entire page (not just the content section) and make it available just to that one client, so you can be a lot more creative with this page, use special templates, add sidebar widgets that show content just for that client, use the commenting system to communicate back and forth with the client.

So if you had a client named John Customer, then you would create a DAP Product by name “John Customer”, then take John’s email id and give John access to his product.

And within this DAP Product, you would’ve protected files, pages and posts that only John should get access to. So since only John has access to the product, only he can get access to the content protected as part of this product.

Obviously, it takes a few minutes of additional setup per customer to create a DAP Product specifically for him, but then the few extra minutes of creating a DAP Product would be nothing compared to the few hours (or tens of hours) that you’re actually going to be taking to create the actual custom content for John. So it’s a very small overhead compared to the whole process, where you are actually creating custom content for each member.

3) No special pages, just DAP’s “Member-Specific Content” Shortcode

If you wish to automated this a bit more than Option #2, then one way is to implement this is using DAP’s “Member-Specific Content” Shortcodes, which look like this:

Using the “userId” parameter in the DAP shortcode, you can now protect a piece of content so that only John Customer (who has the user id “144″ in your membership site) user can see it.

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

So on a single page, you may publish a number of these shortcodes, with content meant only for specific members protected within those shortcodes.

And doesn’t matter which one of your members visits the above page, they will all only see content intended only for them, and will be unable to see content intended for others.

So those are the three ways in which you can create Member-Specific Content.

When you have hundreds of posts or pages protected as part of a DAP Product, the list of links on the DAP Member Home Page (that is the result of using the merge tag %%USERLINKS%%) can get quite long and unwieldy.

So you can choose to hide some of those links from being displayed on the member’s home page.

Here’s how you hide a link from being shown on the member’s home page…

1) Go to the DAP Product in question, scroll down to the ContentResponder section

2) Click on the edit link next to the content in question on the right. The “Edit Files” popup will then show up on the left.

3) Set “Display On User’s Home Page” to “N”.

That’s it.

The content is still part of that product, it is still being protected, but the link simply won’t be displayed on the member home page.

How It Works

Joe Member joins your site on 01/01/2011.

He stays a member for about 3 months. Let’s say it’s now mid March. He wants to take a couple of months break. So he goes on a 2 month break. Comes back end of May and wants to resume his membership.

DAP allows him to pick up right where he left off – which is continuing to receive content as of April (04/01/2011), even though today’s date is May 25th, 2011.

So while he took a break, other members who did not take a break in membership, continued to pay for those 2 months, and continued to receive content dripped through those months. So it is only fair that when he does come back end of May and resumes his subscription, he does not resume from June’s content, but from April’s content (when he last put his membership on “Pause”).

It’s ok if you’re not dripping content on a monthly-basis, but rather on a “day” basis. So to put it in terms of “days”, when Joe resumes his subscription, since he was already 90 days old in the system when he put his subscription “On Hold”, and comes back another 60 days later (roughly about 2 months), then DAP will start dripping Day #91 content onwards for him, and NOT Day #151 onwards (he didn’t pay for 2 months in between).

This is how DAP works right out of the box. Nothing special to configure. And DAP automatically takes care of pausing the dripping when he is not paying.

WARNING: Just remember that in order for you to put his actual payments on hold, you will need to have a payment gateway like Authorize.net or Paypal Website Payments Pro. Or you must be using a shopping cart like http://1SiteAutomation.com . Using something like Paypal Standard or ClickBank will not allow you to put the actual charging of his credit card on hold.

NOTE: If you actually did want him to start receiving current content even though he left for 2 months, then all you have to do is, once he comes back and starts paying again, just extend his access end date on his account (which will initially be showing 03/31/2011 – end of March, when he left) and modify it and make it 05/31/2011. So when his next payment comes in after he resumes, DAP will extend his access end date to 06/30/2011 – which means, he can now access all of the current 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.

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.

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

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.

• Log in to DAP Dashboard and go to the “Products/Lists” page.
• Select the product to which you want this blog post/page to be a part of
• Scroll down to the “ContentResponder” section
• On the left, you will see a list of blog posts & pages that have been published (if you scroll down in the window where the list of “posts” show, you will also see list of “pages”)

• Select one or more (hold Ctrl + Click to select multiple)
• Click on “Add Selected Posts/Pages” to protect the posts/pages.
• The post(s)/page(s) will now show up on the right-hand side of the box.
• Click on “edit” next to each link to configure dripping for individual posts/pages.