Someone buys a product from your site, and you can see in the DAP “Manage Users” panel that they have been added as a user, but that user never gets an email with their logon password. All they get is the PayPal confirmation email. And you want to know “how can I get them to automatically get a “welcome” email with their password”?

This post should help answer that question.

If the users got added but did not receive email, it could because:
1. For that product, you did not set the ‘thank-you’ email subject/body in the DAP Products Page.

Select the product in DAP products page and set the thankyou message content as shown below.

http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/images/DAP_Thankyou_Setup.png

2) You had set the thankyou email message, but the email still did not get delivered.

Go to DAP Setup -> Config -> Basic Category and make sure the “Admin Email” is set to an ‘email address that resides on your domain/hosting account where DAP is installed’ instead of say a gmail or hotmail or yahoo email address.

If you did all this and still the emails are not getting delivered, then checkout our documentation on troubleshooting email delivery here:

http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/doc/troubleshooting-email-delivery

Please check all of the steps at the link below…
http://www.digitalaccesspass.com/doc/setting-up-your-paypal-button-and-paypal-ipn/

Especially check the “notify_url” part towards the end.

If you are absolutely sure that you have followed all of the steps above, and DAP is still not creating an account for the new user, it is possible that your host is not allowing your server and Paypal to communicate correctly. You can confirm if this is an issue, by going to the “Orders” page, searching for all orders, and see if your test purchase in question has been recorded by DAP (even if DAP didn’t give access to the user).

If you find the order in DAP, but the user has not been created, then check with your host and make sure “fopen” or “curl” is enabled for your web site.

If they say it is enabled, and it still doesn’t work, please do the following:

1) Go to Setup > Config > Dap Log Level and set it to “5″.

2) Completely delete test user from DAP

3) Repeat test purchase

3) Go to System > Logs and copy/paste the information there into a support ticket

4) And then please update the ticket with…

* Domain name where DAP is installed
* FTP info
* DAP admin info

And we’ll investigate this asap.

5) Go to Setup > Config > Dap Log Level and set it back to “1″.

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.

The same troubleshooting steps apply for both 1ShoppingCart & ClickBank integration.

There are a few different reasons why this may not be working.

1. Cron Not Running

The DAP email-processing cron that processes the 1SC emails is not running. Check your webhost control panel -> Cron job settings. Make sure dap-emailorder.php is setup to run once every 10 minutes.

2. No Notification Emails from 1SC

The DAP cron is running but 1SC payment notification emails are not reaching your mail server. Check the email account where you expect to receive your 1SC payment notification emails and see if the order notification email from 1SC is in that mail box.

3. Incorrect Mail Server Settings

The cron is running and the 1SC order notification email is reaching your mail server – but you did not configure the mail server settings correctly in DAP Dashboard -> Setup -> Config -> Payment Processing.

Email Server Where Order Emails Come In
Email Server User Name
Email Server Password

4.”Read” Or Deleted Emails

DAP only processes order notification emails that are in the “Unread” status, to prevent previously processed emails and other non-DAP emails from being repeatedly processed.

Also, if you “pop” off the emails from that mail box (means, your email client like Outlook or Thunderbird or Gmail is “removing” your emails from the server when it retrieves them), it means that when DAP logs in to that billing email address, there are no emails there to be processed – the mailbox is empty, or the 1SC payment notification emails have somehow gotten deleted from that mailbox.

So it is possible that DAP is able to connect to your email server, but DAP is not finding any “unread” emails. Please login to your email server and mark all the payment emails that you want DAP to process… as “unread”. And also make sure that your email client does not remove the emails from that mail box.

5.Product Name Mismatch

There might be a “Product Name” mismatch. The product name has to be EXACTLY the same (including case, spaces, etc) in both DAP as well as in 1ShoppingCart. So if you have created a product by name “Widget A”, make sure your 1shoppingcart product also has the exact same name “Widget A”.

If everything is setup correctly, DAP cron will run every 10 minutes and try to process all 1SC emails.

The next time the DAP cron will run (every 10 minutes), it will pick up all the unread payment emails from 1SC.

6. Empty “Thankyou-Email Body/Subject”

Welcome email is not getting sent.

Select the product, and make sure there is some text in the “Thankyou-Email Subject” and “Thankyou-Email Body”. Whatever is in these fields is what gets sent immediately after someone purchases that product (or right after you give them access from the backend).

Now go to DAP Dashboard -> Users -> Add .

Select the product and manually add user. Now see if the thankyou email gets sent to that email id. If it got sent, then your product setup is correct.

Also check the DAP Dashboard -> Orders . Search for all orders, look up the order for the particular user in question by email.

Check the payment status and make sure there is no error there.

If you did all this and things are still not working, please do this:

1. Set DAP Dashboard > Setup Config -> Basic > Log Level = 5
2. Re-run the 1SC test purchase
3. Check the DAP Logs (DAP Dashboard > System > Logs) and send us the log text in there for troubleshooting by pasting it into a new support ticket.

7. Sending Email & Password To Buyer

Make sure you have set the thank-you message with the right merge tags for Email and Password.

8. Manually Running Cron

First set DAP Dashboard > Settings > Config > Log Level = 5

If you feel that the orders were not processed in dap, then just login to the 1SC email account where the sales/payment notification emails are sitting, and mark those orders/emails as UNREAD that you want dap to process.

Then manually run the cron script dap-emailorder.php cron by visiting the following link in the browser.

http://www.yoursite.com/dap/dap-emailorder.php

Replace yoursite.com with the name of your site.

It will just display an empty screen when complete.

Then check “Users > Manage” to see if user has been created.

- Veena Prashanth

There are many ways in which you can protect videos.

Case 1: The video file is stored on your web site

By default, DAP can only protect files that are stored on the same web site where DAP is installed.

So if you install DAP on YourSite.com , then your files must also be located on YourSite.com. DAP installed on YourSite.com cannot protect files (.mp4, .mp3, .html, .pdf, .doc) that are stored on AnotherSite.com.

So assuming the files are stored on the same site as DAP, you can (and should) protect both the actual video file, as well as the blog post or page in which the embed-code for your video is published, by adding both to a Product.

This gives you 2 levels of protection for your videos:

Level 1: The blog post or page containing the video player code, itself is accessible only by authorized members.
Level 2: When an authorized user gets legitimate access to the page where the video is published (because they’re a paying member, say), even if they try to do a view source and figure out the location of the video (eg., http://yoursite.com/videos/howtovideo1.mp4) , and pass it around by email to their friends (or post the link in an online forum), their friends still can’t view the video, because the video link itself is protected by DAP.

If you have some text that you want the casual visitor (and Google) to read, but wish to protect only the video, then you could turn Sneak-Peek on (in Setup > Config > Advanced), insert a WordPress more tag (<!–more–>) into your post just where you want the content to start being protected, and put the video player’s embed code after the more tag.

Case 2: Video file is stored on Amazon S3

The only 3rd-party-stored video files that DAP can protect at this time are videos (and other files) that are stored on Amazon S3. DAP cannot do this by itself, but uses a special WordPress plugin called S3MediaVault.com , which is a plugin we developed specifically to make Amazon S3 videos play in your WordPress blog posts/pages. So again you get 2 levels of protection for your videos…

Level 1: DAP protects the post/page where the special S3MV video player code is embedded
Level 2: The S3MediaVault plugin makes sure that even if someone tried to do a view source and figure out the actual link to your Amazon S3 video, they still won’t be able to view the video.

WARNING: Video stored on other 3rd party video sites

DAP cannot protect, say, videos that are embedded from other 3rd party web sites like YouTube or Hulu. Of course, DAP can always protect the blog post or page itself that contains the video, but once an authorized user gets valid access to that blog page, they can see that it is a YouTube video (say), and then pass that YouTube video link to their friends, in which case DAP cannot protect that external YouTube video link.

What are the minimum web-hosting requirements to run DAP?

• PHP version 5+
• MySQL 4+
• PDO support (for PHP, enabled for MySQL)
• JSON support (for Ajax)
• Ability to run Cron Jobs (scheduled jobs, very useful when sending out autoresponder & broadcast emails)

These are commonly available on most web hosts.

And we’ve seen that most web hosts enable these for your web site, at no additional cost, if you just asked them.

Check with your web host. If they can’t help, then here are a couple of recommended, DAP-Certified web hosts.

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

Important Basics

Use two different browsers for testing. Not two different browser tabs, but 2 completely different browsers – like Chrome and FireFox, or FireFox and Internet Explorer. Log in as DAP admin using one browser, and then as a regular user in another browser. That way, you keep the access separate, and your testing will be clean and easy.

If you are using, say, Firefox, you are logged in to DAP admin, and are browsing your blog or trying to access content on your blog, then you will only have access to the content that the admin user has access to. You, as the DAP Admin, DO NOT have automatic access to every product by default. You will have to manually give yourself access to every product you create. And if you want yourself to have “PAID” access, then you have to mark yourself as “PAID”.

That is because, if DAP gave you automatic access to all products, then you will go ahead and protect a blog post, try to access that blog post, and DAP will give you access to that content because you as admin have automatic access to the product. And then you will wonder “Hey, I protected a blog post, but I’m still seeing it.

It’s Probably Not DAP

We realize that your first gut reaction is to blame DAP . That’s what we would’ve done too, if we hadn’t developed DAP.

But please note that whatever issue it is, you can be 99% sure that it’s not a bug. Because access-related bugs are extremely rare. We also do a lot of pre-release testing, then we release a beta version, then we get hundreds, if not thousands of people to try the beta, iron out the issues, and then release the final version to everyone else. So if there were a bug, it would’ve been caught a long time before it gets to you.

So we request you to approach things with an open mind, and try to think through calmly (and logically why a certain user does not have access to a certain piece of content.

Now, on to more specific issues and specific answers…

1) I have protected a blog post as part of a Product. But I can still access it.

Short Answer: If you have protected a post/page/file, try to access it, and are able to do it, then it means you DO have access to it. Now let’s troubleshoot so that you understand the “how” and the “why”.

• Have you added the blog post to a Product? If you don’t add it to a DAP Product, the post/page/file won’t be protected.
• Who are you logged in as? As DAP Admin? Or as a regular member?
• Now if you search for this user by email id or last name on the “Users > Manage” page, you will see that the user does have access to the product to which the post belongs

Are you already logged in a a user who has access to that link? Maybe logged in as DAP Admin, and that is why you are able to access the link? If so, either log out of DAP, or visit your blog in a completely new browser (if you’re logged in as DAP Admin in FireFox, then visit your blog using Internet Explorer).

1A) I have newly setup DAP. Protected a blog post as part of a Product. But I can still access it, and I am not logged in.

If this is a new site that has just setup DAP, it is possible that the DAP changes that need to go into your .htaccess file at the main folder of your blog in question, didn’t go in correctly.

• Step AA: Open the .htaccess file at the root of your blog, then see if there’s text that looks like this:
  #—– START DAP —–
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !(.*)(\.php|\.css|\.js|\.jpg|\.gif|\.png|\.txt)$
  RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} (.*)/wp-content/uploads/(.*)
  RewriteRule (.*) /dap/client/website/dapclient.php?dapref=%{REQUEST_URI}&plug=wp&%{QUERY_STRING}  [L]
  #—– END DAP —–

  If you see it, then simply open a ticket, and we’ll troubleshoot.

• Step BB: If you don’t see it, then log in as WP Admin, go to “Settings > Permalinks”. Then pick a permalink structure OTHER than “default”. Then save the setting. Even if something other than “default” is already picked, simply hit the save button anyway. That’s when the .htaccess gets updated. Now go to Step AA above and verify the text in the .htaccess file. If it’s still not there, just open a ticket.

2) I have protected a blog post as part of a Product. User has access to it, but still can’t access it.

Short Answer: If you have protected a post/page/file, try to access it, and are able to do it, then it means you DO NOT have access to it. Now let’s troubleshoot so that you understand the “how” and the “why”.

• Who are you logged in as? As DAP Admin? Or as a regular member?
• Whoever you are logged in as, make sure that user (admin user or regular user) has access to the product to which the post belongs
• Have you added the post as a “PAID” or as “FREE”?
• If you have marked the post as “PAID”, make sure the user also is a “PAID” user (either there must have been a real transaction, or you must have manually marked him as “PAID”). Because free users cannot access content that has been marked as “PAID”.
• Maybe the user’s access to the product has expired. Check the user’s “Access Start Date” and “Access End Date” for that product. The start date should be current (not be in the future) and the end date should be current (shouldn’t be in the past, which means his access to the product has expired)

3) I don’t want the links to all my protected blog posts showing up on my blog’s home page

Make sure you have “Sneak-Peek” turned off in the DAP Admin Config section. Once you do that, posts that are protected will not be displayed on the home page as well as if someone tried to visit the link directly.

4) Why do I see the “Lock” symbol on my blog’s home page?

It’s possible that you have no published posts (it’s a new blog), or you have probably protected all of the posts by adding them all to a DAP Product.

5) I have protected a blog post, but the entire blog post shows up, with the lock image at the very bottom

This is probably because you have turned on “Sneak-Peek”, but have not inserted the “More” tag into the post/page in question.

• Do you want a part of the protected content (like a “snippet”) to show even for users who are not eligible to access the post or page? If yes, then go to “Setup > Config > Advanced > WordPress Sneak Peek: Show snippets of post (upto the `More` break) even for protected posts?” and change the setting to “Y”, and save.
• If you turn on Sneak-Peek, then you *must* insert the WordPress “More” tag into every single blog post and page that you currently have protected.

So for the above issue, do one of the following…

1) Turn Sneak-Peek to off (set it to “N”)

- OR-

2) Insert the WordPress “More” tag into the post/page.

Doing either one should resolve this issue.

6) Members getting locked out because access end date is in the past

The only time a member’s access end date goes into the past, if their recurring payments are no longer coming in.

Which means, either they have canceled (or gotten a refund), or your membership level’s lifecycle has ended (like, if your Product/Level was a micro-continuity subscription program that lasts only for 6 months).

If the payments are still coming in, their end dates should keep getting extended by DAP automatically.

If payments are coming in, but the dates are not getting extended, then the payment link between DAP and your Payment Processor somehow broke, and you need to visit the Payment Processor integration documentation for your specific payment processor, and troubleshoot why the payments are coming in fine, but DAP is not processing them.

To ensure members’ access does not stop, make sure that their payments do not stop, and the recurring cycles in the product match that of your payment processor. Say, if your payment processor is processing recurring payments every 30 days, then DAP’s recurring cycles (on the Product page) should also be 30. If it’s 31, then DAP’s should also be 31.

Tip: It’s not a bad idea to set DAP’s recurring cycle day to 1 more than your payment processor’s recurring cycle, just in case your payment processor takes an extra day to process the actual payments. So in that case, if you have set your Payment processor to charge every 30 days, you could set DAP’s recurring cycle to 31 (one extra day grace period, just in case the recurring payment does not get processed on time).

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.

DAP works off-the-shelf on almost all decent web hosts.

But as in any industry, some hosts are just outdated, run old, outdated and deprecated versions of the software, do not offer a choice to upgrade to the latest server software (like a recent version of PHP or MySQL). And some are just not helpful at all.

If you had a choice of picking a new web host, then here are the web hosts we use ourselves, and highly recommend, and they have everything readily available that DAP needs to run smoothly.

1) Dream Host

2) Host Monster

3) Blue Host

If your host is not shown here, it doesn’t mean that DAP won’t work on your host.

These just happen to be the ones we recommend if you have the option of picking a new web host.

Plus that is exactly why we offer the free 30-day trial – to make sure DAP can run on your current web site, and also help you decide if DAP will work for you.

So there’s no risk to you, regardless of who you are hosting with.

- Ravi