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.

You already know that you can create a “My Content” kind of page within WordPress, that will list all products that a user has access to, and then each product will list the content that they currently have access to (content that has already dripped on them).

But this page is a full-summary of all products, all listed on one page.

Instead, if you wished to create product-specific download pages, where you create a separate page for each product, that lists all the content within just that product alone, then that’s where DAP’s “ProductLinks” Widget comes in handy.

Here’s how you set it up.

1. In WordPress admin, go to “Appearance > Widgets” and enable the “DAP ProductLinks” widget by dragging it onto a widgetized section of your theme’s sidebar.
   
2. As soon as you do that, the DAP ProductLinks widget will show up in your blog’s side bar.
   
3. By default, each of the product names – like “Gold Membership” in the above example – will link to whatever URL you put into the “Post-Login URL” for that particular product (DAP Dashboard > Products > Manage). So the next step is to create a separate page for each product, and then enter the permalink for this new page, into the Post-Login URL of that Product within DAP.
4. Create a new page in WordPress – call it, “Gold Membership Content” (for example). In the body of the page, enter the following DAP merge tag:%%PRODUCT_DETAILS_<id>%%
   

   Replace the entire text <id> with the actual Product id from DAP (Products > Manage)

   So, if the product’s id is 6 in DAP, then the merge code becomes:

   %%PRODUCT_DETAILS_6%%

   Save the page. And if you gave the page the title “Gold Membership Content”, then the permalink for this page will be:
   http://YourSite.com/gold-membership-content/

   

5. Take the above permalink and enter it into the product “Gold Membership” in the “Post-Login URL” field. That’s it!
   
6. Do the above for all products and you’re done.

End Result

• For each product that your member buys, the “Your Products” widget will show in the side-bar.
• It will list all of the products that the member has purchased.
• Each of the product names will link to it’s own specific content page
• When member goes to that page, the DAP merge tag you entered for that product will expand into product details and product-specific content links just for that product.

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.

Welcome Emails Not Going Out

See this post: Troubleshooting Welcome-Email Delivery

Autoresponder Emails Not Going Out

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

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 (AuthSMTP.com or SMTP.com) (less expensive than Aweber, slightly less reliable too)

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

You could always use DAP and external SMTP service provider like AuthSMTP.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_ID%%

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.

NOTE: This content is for advanced users only, who understand the concept of user tables, database, etc. If you don’t understand any of this, then just ignore this – you don’t really need to know this in order to use DAP. This is only an explanation for those who wish to go under the hood of DAP and its integration with WordPress.

As you probably already know, WordPress has its own user database.

DAP has its own User database, and doesn’t use the WordPress database – for many reasons, not limited to the following…

1) Ability to store more user information than what WordPress allows

2) More powerful user search, profile updates, affiliate information, etc.

So, if you want to use any WordPress based plugins – like WordPress Forums or Subscribe2Blog – these forums are looking at WordPress’ native user database.

Now comes the necessity of “syncing” the DAP user data and your WordPress user data.

In the DAP Dashboard, in “Setup > Config > Advanced“, you will see two settings for syncing DAP & WP user data.

(1) Sync DAP User data and WP User data

If you turn this to “Y” (for “Yes”), then every time someone logs into DAP, their DAP user data (just name and email) is automatically “synced” with WordPress user data. If you set this to “N”, then no data will be transferred from DAP to WordPress.

(2) Sync WP data only for PAID users

This one matters only if you have set (1) above to “Y”.

If you want only your “PAID” members to be synced with WordPress, then set this to “Y“.

If you want both “FREE” and “PAID” members synced with WordPress, then set this to “N“.

Here’s how it actually works:

1. For the sync to work, you must first setup and save the above 2 config settings
2. After you save the above two config settings, make sure you log out of DAP and re-log in (if you are/were logged in and testing as a regular user), because only then, the Config settings above will take effect.
3. Your user must log in through a DAP login form (not the WP login form).
4. Make sure the user is redirected to any part of your WordPress blog after log in. This can be done via “Logged In URL” setting in DAP Config.
5. The user can be redirected to any WP page, WP post or even your blog home page – that’s the only time the ‘syncing’ kicks in.
6. When user lands on any page/post of your WP blog, then the DAP LiveLinks plugin (which you have already installed & enabled) kicks of the “sync”, copies the logged in member’s name and email over to the WordPress user table, and also automatically logs him into your WordPress blog.

That’s all there is to it.

Also see: Forum Integration

DAP allows you to create an opt-in form to directly sign-up users to your Product (which also acts as a “list” if you only want to drip or broadcast emails).

This is very similar to creating a sign-up form at Aweber or 1ShoppingCart, and allowing people to directly sign up by entering just their First Name & Email Id.

How To Generate Direct Signup Form HTML

1) Create a Product or select an existing Product

2) Click on the link below the product list that says “Direct Signup Form HTML”

3) That will bring up a little pop-up that will have the HTML for the signup form.

4) The form looks something like this:

<form name=”dap_direct_signup” method=”post” action=”http://www.YourSite.com/dap/signup_submit.php”>
<table>
<tr><td>First Name: </td>   <td><input type=”text” name=”first_name” size=”10″></td></tr>
<tr><td>Email:</td>    <td><input type=”text” name=”email” size=”10″></td></tr>
<tr>    <td colspan=”2″><input type=”submit” name=”Submit” value=”Sign Up”></td></tr>
</table>
<input type=”hidden” name=”productId” value=”1″>
<input type=”hidden” name=”redirect” value=”/dap/login.php?msg=Success!%20Your%20membership%20account%20has%20been%20created.%20%20Check%20your%20email%20address%20in%20a%20few%20minutes%20for%20your%20password“>
</form>

Paste the above form into any HTML page, or WordPress Page or Post where you want the direct sign-up form to appear.

The form already has all the code required to add the user to your member database, with “Free” access to the Product (for which you generated the HTML code)

That’s it!

With DAP 4.0, we allow the following additional fields to be accepted via the direct signup form.
first_name, last_name, user_name, email, address1, address2, city, state,zip,country, company,phone,fax,title,paypal_email

Take the direct signup form code from the dap products page, and to that, you can add additional attributes with the following names:

For ex:
If you want to accept the user’s paypal email address, the just that to the form code above:

<tr>
<td>Paypal Email:</td>
<td><input type=”text” name=”paypal_email” size=”10″></td>
</tr>
<tr>

Frequently Asked Questions

Can this form be published on any site? Or can it be published only on the site where DAP is installed?

This form can be published on any web site – can be completely different from the site where DAP is installed. Please note that the above form submits to the url “http://www.YourSite.com/dap/signup_submit.php” – so doesn’t matter which site this form is published on, the user is always added to the site where DAP is installed, which is http://www.YourSite.com.

What happens after user signup?

If you note the text in bold in the above form (reproduced below)…

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

… you’ll see that the default form redirects to the page /dap/login.php (which is the default dap login page) and on that page, displays on the message “Success! Your membership account has been created. Check your email addresss in a few minutes for your password”.

After Sign up is complete, how to redirect to a link of my choice?

In the form, you can modify the hidden field named “redirect” to any URL of your choice. Here are some examples:

<input type=”hidden” name=”redirect” value=”http://www.SomeOtherNonDAPSite.com/thankyou.html“>

OR

<input type=”hidden” name=”redirect” value=”http://www.YourSite.com/2010/12/31/thank-you“>

When an unauthorized visitor tries to access a protected page or post, you can choose from among two things that can happen:

1) Display an “In-Page Error Message“: They can be presented with an error message that shows a “lock” image. You can show the standard DAP version, or you can customize this message and add your own text.

-OR-

2) Redirect to Error Page: They can be redirected to any other page of your choice (WordPress page or post, or a completely non-WP page)

1. Display “In-Page” Error Message

“In-Page” basically means that this message will be shown on the same page that the user is trying to access (to which they do not have access). So basically, the content of the very post or page they’re trying to access, will be replaced by this “In-Page” error message.

The default error messages shown by DAP are as follows.

A) If a visitor is NOT logged in, then they will see…

(Image A)

B) If a visitor IS logged in, then they will see…

(Image B)

If you see Image A above, there is a line of text that says: “Click here to get access”.

And in Image B above, there is a line of text that says: “If you are a free member, then click here to purchase access”.

In both cases, the text “click here” is actually a link. And by default, that link will point to whatever you put in the “Sales Page URL” in your DAP Product (to which the above post/page is part of). See Image C below.

(Image C)

Displaying Custom Error Message

If you wish to customize the above standard error messages, then here’s what you need to do:

1. Go to /dap/inc/ folder. There are two files there:error-loggedin.php , and
   error-notloggedin.php
2. Make a copy of both files on your computer, and add the text ‘custom‘ to the front of each of the file names of the newly copied files. So the new files are now called: customerror-loggedin.php , and
   customerror-notloggedin.php
   
3. Open customerror-loggedin.php and customerror-notloggedin.php and modify them as you please, change the text, formatting, font size, color, etc.
4. Upload the new files to the same folder – /dap/inc/ – as the original error files.That’s it. DAP will then ignore the old error files, and start displaying your new “custom” error messages.

2. Redirect to Error Page

Instead of showing an error page (default or custom, from (1) above) you can also redirect the un-authorized user to a completely new page/post of your choice.

If you see Image D below, you will see that on the DAP Products page, there is a field called “Error Page URL“.

By default, this is pointing to /dap/product-error.php

(Image D)

Change this to any link you want. Examples…

http://YourSite.com/myerrorpage.html , or

http://YourSite.com/myerrorpage/

Whatever you put in the above field (Error Page URL) is what page the user will be redirected to, when they access a page that they don’t have access to (either because they have not logged in, or because they are logged in, but don’t have access to it yet).

When your visitor encounters a “Sorry, you’re unable to access this content” page that has the DAP Padlock image on it, you can customize the text that shows up below the padlock by doing this:

1) Open the file error.php that is stored in the /dap/inc/ folder.

2) RENAME it as (or COPY it as) customerror.php.

3) You can put ANY kind of HTML content within this. Images, javascript, css,, buttons, text, whatever. Any HTML can be used in this file.

4) Upload this new file customerror.php back to same folder /dap/inc/

5) error.php doesn’t matter any more. Whether you delete it, or just leave it alone, the fact that there is a customerror.php file in the same directory means that DAP won’t even bother about error.php any more.

6) Future updates of DAP will not touch your customerror.php file. So updates or upgrades will not mess with your custom error page copy.