DAP has a feature called “Sneak-Peek” where you can show a part of your blog post for all casual visitors, and then when they click on the “Read more…” link, the protection will kick in for the rest of the post, and DAP will say something to the effect of “Sorry, you must be logged in to access this content. Please login below or click here to get access”.

And that error page will contain both the login form, as well as a link to your sales page. Of course, you can customize this error page to say whatever you want, but that’s another topic altogether.

How this works

WordPress has a feature called the “more” tag. Basically it is a piece of text that you insert into your posts or pages (it actually looks like this: <!–more–>) and then WP will break up your post right at the point where you inserted the more tag, and replace that tag (and everything that follows) with a “Read more…” link. You can also insert the more tag in to your post or page, by clicking on the icon that looks like two rectangles, on the WP Publish page.

Of course, exactly what that “Read more” link will say (it could say, for eg., “Click here to read the rest of this post”) is determined by your WP theme.

So regardless of what it says, when you have a protected post, by default that post will completely disappear from your blog for non-members and those who are logged in, but don’t have access to it yet. And even to Google.

But if you insert the “More” tag in to all of your pages and posts, and in the DAP Dashboard, go t…

“Setup > Config > Advanced > WordPress Sneak Peek: Show snippets of post (upto the `More` break) even for protected posts?”

… and set the above setting to “Y” (for ‘yes’), then on your blog’s summary page (which lists all of your posts), all posts with the more tag (protected and un-protected will anyway show up to the more tag, but when someone clicks on the “Read more’ link, that’s when DAP’s security kicks in and if the user has access to that content, will show her the rest of the post. And if the user is either not logged in, or does not have access to that content (either access is yet to come because of the drip, or content has already expired), then it will show the appropriate error message.

“Logged-in URL” on Product page is not taking user to right page after log in.

The Logged-In URL field will work only if user has access to just that one product. If user has access to more than 1-product, DAP cannot decide which Product’s “Logged-In URL” to redirect the user to. So it simply uses the “Global” logged-in URL in “Setup > Config > URL to which User is redirected to, right after log in.”

So if you’re testing the “Logged-In URL” field, make sure you create a test user with access to just that one product, and then log in as her and test.

There are many reasons for wanting to do this.

1) You simply don’t wish to let people know that you have an affiliate program – maybe it is so that you don’t want to confuse the mom-and-pop niche that you are in with crazy words like “Affiliate” and “Commission”

2) You deliberately want to disable certain users from using the affiliate link, and not award them any commissions, even though they know what that link is.

3) You are using a 3rd party affiliate service – like ClickBank – and don’t want to use DAP’s built-in affiliate program.

At this time, you cannot really do (2). There is no way to stop DAP from tracking an affiliate’s referrals and not tracking their earnings. Only work-around right now, is to simply not pay them at all, for whatever reason (you better have a very good reason, if not it could be legal trouble for you).

Here’s how you can do (1) – which essentially works for (3) also.

A) If you are using the default dap/index.php as your members’ home page, then all you have to do is to go to…

Setup > Config > Advanced > “Should Affiliate Section be displayed on User `Home` Page? (If using ClickBank, set this to `N`)”

And set it to “N” (for “No”).

That will essentially “hide” the affiliate section from showing up on the default DAP home page.

B) If you are not using the default dap/index.php, and are putting all of the DAP member content (like User Profile, User Links, Affiliate Details) etc right into your WordPress blog, then just skip the Affiliate Details part, and don’t create a custom page for Affiliates within your blog. If you don’t create the page, then they won’t see it, that’s all.

NOTE: If you don’t want anyone to get any commissions, also make sure that you don’t set up any commissions on the “Affiliates > Set Commissions” page.

So basically, in both (A) and (B), you are essentially “hiding” the affiliate program details, and not really disabling it.

In a future version of DAP, we will have the ability to selectively turn off an individual’s ability to use their affiliate link, so DAP will completely ignore all referrals from the affiliate, and won’t track anything from them.

Subscriber Flow

The flow of subscriber in this model, is “FROM Aweber TO DAP“. User gets added to Aweber first, then arrives at DAP via Aweber “thank you page”, at which point she gets added to DAP.

If you are looking for the other way, i.e, “FROM DAP TO Aweber”, then click here.

How it works

If you use email parsing to integrate DAP and Aweber, then the Aweber list will always be double-opt-in.

But if you want your Aweber list to be single-opt-in, then you can use the Aweber webform (instead of DAP sign-up form) and follow the steps below to integrate DAP with Aweber.

1. Go to DAP admin panel -> manage products page.

2. Note down the product Id of the product to which you want to signup the users.

3. There is a file called dap-aweber.php in your /dap folder. Make a copy of that file and call it dap-aweber-<productId>.php. Replace <productId> with the product Id you noted in step 2.
If the productId = 2, then you will end up with a file called dap-aweber-2.php.

4. Open this file (dap-aweber-2.php), and change this line:
$default_product_id = 1; //Change this to any product id from DAP

So, in this example, change it to:
$default_product_id = 2; //Change this to any product id from DAP

Upload this file back to /dap folder on your site.

3. Now login to AWeber, select your single-opt-in list in AWeber -> Webform -> click on ‘Go to Step 2′ towards the bottom of the page.

http://screencast.com/t/ZTE0MDhhYTY

Click on the thankyou page dropdown and select ‘custom page’.
Set the thank you Page URL to http://<yoursite.com>/dap/dap-aweber-<productId>.php
Replace <yoursite.com> with the name of your site. Replace <productId> with the product Id you noted in step 2.

4. Use the Aweber web form for signing up customers (instead of dap direct signup form).

That’s it.

Everytime a users signs up via the aweber web form to your site, they will automatically be added to DAP.

You can configure the welcome/thankyou message in DAP to send out the dap login id and password
OR
You can leave the welcome/thankyou message in DAP empty. Configure DAP to generate a default password (DAP Admin -> Setup -> config -> Advanced) as shown in the screencast below and set up an autoresponder in Aweber so when the users signup via the Aweber form, they can receive their dap id/password details via Aweber directly.

http://screencast.com/t/MjY0NGI3

When you use the merge tag %%LOGIN_FORM%% in a WordPress page, the tag is replaced by a login form that your member can use to log in to your membership site.

If you wish to customize the look & feel or text of the form, then rename the file…

wp-content/plugins/DAP-WP-LiveLinks/DAP-WP-LoginForm.html

To…

wp-content/plugins/DAP-WP-LiveLinks/customDAP-WP-LoginForm.html

Basically you are adding the text “custom” to the beginning of the file name, that’s it.

And this new file will also reside in the same directory.

Once you have this new file in the directory, DAP will ignore the old, default file, and will only use your new custom version.

Starting DAP v3.8, we have a new feature called “Product-Specific Details“.

This feature basically allows you to put all of the Product-specific details (including links available to the member as part of that Product) on a specific WordPress page.

Here’s how it works:

1. Go to DAP Dashboard > Products > Manage

2. Select the Product for which you wish to generate the Product-specific details page. Note down the Product Id (it’s a number as shown below)

3. Create a new WordPress Page – give it any title you want. Put in the text…

%%PRODUCT_DETAILS_<insert-product-id>%%

So in the above example, since the Product Id is “1″, the merge code becomes:

%%PRODUCT_DETAILS_1%%

Publish the page.

4. When you view the page, it will show the product’s details.

That’s pretty much it as far as creating the Product details page is concerned.

Where to use this

Starting DAP v3.8, you can now take the permalink for this above page and enter it into the “Logged-in URL” field of the Product. This field is basically for specifying a Product-specific URL for showing users right after they login. So that way, when someone purchases this product, and logs in to your membership site, instead of showing the default member details page, you could show them just a product-specific page.

The Basics Of Sending Email Through Your Web Site

DAP is not an email service (like, say, Aweber).

DAP is just a script – a tool, like Microsoft Outlook or Thunderbird – that simply sends out email using your web host’s email server.

It is your web host’s mail server that actually sends out the email to the recipient. So once DAP sends out the email, it has no control over what happens next.

It’s just like when you put your (regular mail) letter in the mailbox (post box). It is then up to the Postal Service to actually pick up your letter, and deliver to the destination address.

So if the emails that DAP sends out don’t get delivered to your recipients, there could be more than one reason for that.

Autoresponder Emails Not Going Out

If yours is a new site setup, then this is usually becausthe hourly cron-job has not been setu.

However, if the emails were going out fine previously, and suddenly stopped going out, then it usually is because…

• Something changed on your host that caused the cron to stop working.
• There is an error in the job queue, because of which DAP is unable to proceed with the remaining non-error emails. This could have happened if you tried to send out a broadcast to a CSV list, and there was an error in one of the emails from the CSV list.
• You’re trying to use a third party “SMTP” server to send out the emails, and your server is unable to connect to that server because the authentication settings you’ve configured on “Email > SMTP” are incorrect.

Steps to troubleshoot

1. Make sure that the hourly cron (dap-cron.php) is still running – you need to look at your web hosting control panel for that.
2. Go to “System > Job Queue” and scroll through any items there, and see if there are any scheduled messages there with the status “Error”. If yes, then click on the “Delete Jobs In Error” link. That will delete any jobs that can’t be processed because of an error in the email id or in the import process. Also be sure to click on “Delete Successful Jobs (till yesterday)” just to clear up old, sent emails.
3. Also go to “System > Logs” and empty the logs.
4. Go to “System > Config” and set “DAP Log Level” to “5″. That will start logging all the details you/we may need for troubleshooting.
5. Wait for the top of the next hour and then re-visit the queue and see if emails are going out.
6. If they still aren’t going out, go back to “System > Logs”, copy paste all text there, and open a new ticket with that info, of course, also giving us more details about the problem, what you have tried, etc, along with your login info for: FTP, WP Admin, DAP Admin, and Web Host Control Panel.

Server Blacklisting

If your inexpensive (read as cheap shared web host is hosting a large number of sites on one server, and one of them knowingly sends out spam (or mistakenly gets flagged for spam), that will put the email deliverability of every web site on that server in jeopardy, because your site now shares the same IP address as that of an “alleged” spammer.

So your emails get sent to junk/spam folder by Gmail and Yahoo. Or worse, they just totally disappear into the ether.

Hourly Email-Sending Limits

Almost all shared hosts have hourly email sending limits. For example, DreamHost has an outgoing limit of 300 emails per hour. Which means, a total of only 300 emails can be sent out per hour through any web site hosted on DreamHost. All of the following count towards the 300 limit:

• Emails sent by any scripts on your site – like DAP
• Your WordPress blog notification emails
• Your WordPress admin emails,
• WP forgot password emails,
• WP comment notification emails,
• Forum notification emails,
• Forum emails sent to each other by your users,
• Forum-software Admin notification emails,
• Support software user and admin notification emails
• Tell-a-friend emails
• Viral-inviter type emails
• Emails sent through Outlook or Thunderbird where you have set the outgoing SMTP server to be your web site’s SMTP server
• Emails sent by others using the same SMTP server to send out emails-  like your business partners, employees, etc
• DAP User welcome emails, Payment notification emails, Forgot password emails, Autoresponder emails, Broadcast emails, etc

So do you see how quickly you can go over that hourly limit of 300 emails per hour?

But here comes the worst part

Once you go over that limit, any emails that are actually sent by you or the scripts running on your site, will not actually result in any kind of error. The mail server will respond by saying that the email(s) has been sent successfully, but in reality, on the backend, it quietly “snuffs out” the email. Which means, it doesn’t go anywhere – just gets sent to a “blackhole”. So you keep thinking that you sent out the email. DAP keeps thinking it has sent out the email. But in reality, the emails never actually get sent.

This is the same as you actually putting your letter into the mailbox at the Post Office. But then, imagine this: The postal worker who comes to pick up your mail, quietly goes to the back of the post office and dumps it all into one giant trash can, and destroys all of the mail. So you’re thinking you actually mailed out that important check to pay your utility bill. But the utility company never gets your check, and they slam you with a late fee.

Possible Solutions

1) DAP + Aweber (most expensive, most reliable)

2) DAP + 3rd party SMTP service provider (Fusemail.com or SMTP.com) (less expensive than Aweber, slightly less reliable too)

3) DAP + Good web host (cheapest, can have mixed results – all depends on your host).

You could always use DAP and external SMTP service provider like Fusemail.com or SMTP.com to send out bulk mail through DAP while totally bypassing your web host’s email system. This is probably the next best thing to using a service like Aweber.

And if you can’t afford even that, then simply use DAP on a good web host. We ourselves use just DAP and Dreamhost‘s email servers to send out emails to all of our users.

And DAP also has built-in job queues to schedule outgoing emails while also making sure that you don’t exceed your web host’s hourly email sending limits (dreamhost’s limit is 300 emails/hour, I think). We use multiple SMTP servers from our own other web sites, all combined to be able to send a few thousand emails per hour.

But even with a lot of planning, it is easy to go over the hourly limit.

So the next time you see in your Job Queue that emails were sent out successfully, but the recipient never received it, here are some things to check:

1) It landed in your recipient’s junk/spam folder. Ask them to whitelist or add your email address to their contacts list.

2) You have overshot the limit, so you would have to actually send out the email again.

3) Try to send out broadcasts during a low-traffic time – say like later in the night – when you’re not actively sending out emails, and using up precious email counts from that hourly quota.

So you want your blog’s home page to be a “static” page – could be your “Sales page”.

And then you want your actual blog content (where all of your posts show in reverse order), on a different page – like “Members” or “Lessons” or “Blog”.

Here’s how  you do it.

1. Create Static WordPress “Page”

Create a WordPress “page” that will become your blog’s new “static” home page. Let’s give it the title, “Home”. Publish your content within this WP page, and it could even have a sign-up form, or your “Buy” button(s). Publish it.

2. Create “Placeholder” WordPress page for your blog posts

Next, you create a new page which will not have any content, but will serve as a “placeholder” for all of your blog posts to be displayed in reverse chronological order, just like it would show up on any regular blog. In the example below, the page title is “Chapters”. You could call it “Lessons”, “Blog”, “Blog Posts”, “Member Blog”, etc.

3. Change WordPress Settings

In your WP Admin dashboard, go to “Settings > Reading”

a) Change “Front page displays” to “A static page“, as shown below.

b) In the drop down below…

For “Front Page“, pick the page you created in Step 1 above (your static “Home” page).

For “Posts Page“, pick the page you created in Step 2 above (your “Chapters” page).

That’s it.

To see a working example of a “static” home page in wordpress, which can be used as your Sales page or as a Squeeze page, see http://NBLEB.com/blog/

Oh, and none of this has anything to do with DAP, by the way. This is all WordPress.

Here are the merge-tags that you can use in outgoing autoresponder and broadcast emails sent through DAP. (Click here for merge tags you can use in your WordPress blog posts/pages)

%%FIRST_NAME%%

This will be replaced by the first-name of the user.

%%LAST_NAME%%

This will be replaced by the first-name of the user.

%%EMAIL%%

This will be replaced by the email id of the user.

%%PASSWORD%%

This will be replaced by the password of the user.

%%SITE_NAME%%

This will be replaced by whatever text you have entered in “Setup > Config > Basic > Site Name” in your DAP Dashboard.

%%ADMIN_NAME%%

This will be replaced by whatever text you have entered in “Setup > Config > Basic > Admin Name” in your DAP Dashboard.

%%ADMIN_EMAIL%%

This will be replaced by whatever text you have entered in “Setup > Config > Basic > Admin Email” in your DAP Dashboard.

%%AFF_LINK%%

This will be replaced by the actual affiliate link of the member (Eg., http://yoursite.com/dap/a/?a=1234)

%%SITE_URL_DAP%%

Replaced by your actual web site url (Eg., http://yoursite.com)

%%UNSUB_LINK%%

This is replaced by a 1-click Unsubscribe link that you can add to the bottom of your outgoing broadcast and autoresponder emails.

Here’s how you can customize the HTML, look & feel of the DAP Sidebar Login Widget.

There is a file in the following folder…

/wp-content/plugins/DAP-WP-LiveLinks/

by name…

DAP-WP-LoginForm-LoginLogout.html

Make a copy of that file on your desktop, rename it to…

customDAP-WP-LoginForm-LoginLogout.html

(just added the text “custom” at the front of the original file’s name).

You can then modify this new file however you want, including altering spacing, and that’s what will be displayed.

Just be careful what you change – do not modify the field names or the submit URL. Feel free to change other visual elements.