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But as in any industry, some hosts are just outdated, run old, outdated and deprecated versions of the software, do not offer a choice to upgrade to the latest server software (like a recent version of PHP or MySQL).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

How to get DAP installed for FREE!

Go to http://www.DigitalAccessPass.com/support/ , open a ticket, and enter the following information in the ticket (after filling in the blanks, of course

Your Email Id Used During Purchase: __________
Domain name: __________
FTP Host name: __________
FTP Username: __________
FTP Password: __________

Link to Your WordPress Blog: __________
WordPress Admin Username: __________
WordPress Admin Password: __________

Which one of these Payment Processors do you wish to use to accept payments for your membership site?
(Paypal/1Shoppingcart/ClickBank): ______________

Web Site Control Panel Info (to create cron jobs):
Control Panel Link: __________
Username: __________
Password __________

DAP has a Login/Logout Widget that you can use in any widget-ready theme.

Log in as WP admin, and look under “Appearance > Widgets”.

You’ll see the widget. Drag this widget on to any customizable part of your theme.

The widget puts the DAP login form right on your sidebar.

When a user is not logged in, they will see the login form.

When they are logged in, they just see a “Logout” button.

(OR) How do members get access to the content

(OR) How does someone become a member?

With DAP, you can add users to your membership site in 3 different ways.

1.  PURCHASE: Someone buys your product or subscribes (“Paid” member with access to both free and paid content)

2.  FORM SIGNUP: Someone signs up through a signup form (“Free” members with access to only free content)

3. ADMIN ADDED: You add them as a member directly through the DAP Admin Control Panel (you can mark them as either “free” or “paid”)

All three are explained in detail below.

1. PURCHASE

*You first create a “Sales Page”.

On your sales page, depending on which payment processor you use, you go to Paypal/1ShoppingCart/ClickBank and create a new product with the EXACT same name as the product you created within DAP, and get the ‘Buy Button’ link from your Payment Processor. Publish this “Buy Button” on your sales page.

* Your visitor goes to your sales page

* They purchase your product

* Your payment process (Paypal/1ShoppingCart/ClickBank) notifies DAP that you have a new purchase.

* If the product names match, DAP automatically creates an account for them, generates a random password, and sends them an email with their email/password. You can customize the contents of this email on the “Templates” screen in your DAP Admin Control Panel. Integration with your shopping cart explained elsewhere (see documentation for setup).

That’s it!

That’s how “buyers” get added to your membership site and get access to the product they just purchased.

2.  FORM SIGNUP:

You wish to give someone a “Free” membership.

NOTE: “Free” members who do not have a payment associated in DAP (which means they have not purchased anything) will have access only to content that you have marked as “Free”.

Once you have created a Product in DAP, and have added content (blog post/page links, links to files, etc), and have saved it, on the Product page, below the Product name list, you will see a link called “Direct Signup HTML”. (See image below). You must first select a Product before you can copy the correct form HTML.

Fig 1. Direct Signup Link on Products page

Fig 2. Form HTML that you get on clicking the Direct Signup Link

This HTML gives you the full HTML form code that you can publish on any page of your web site. This form only collects an email address and a first name.

Take this HTML code and publish it on page of your web site where you want sign up users. This could be a WP page or post too.

Note: When you see the above HTML code, there’s a field in there that looks like this:

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

Don’t forget to change the text above, where it says “http://YourSite/Your-login-page-link/?…” to point to your actual domain name and to your actual login page (if you have customized it).

Then, when someone enters their email address and first name and signs up through the signup form, DAP creates an account for them using that email address, creates a random password, and sends them an email with their email/password.

After that, you can drip any content or emails on them that are marked as “Free” (when adding content or emails).

At some later point, if they purchase any of your “Paid” products (see the “1. Purchase” section above), then as long as they use the same email id during purchase, DAP will automatically give them access to all of the “Paid” content in the Product that they just purchased.

3. ADMIN ADDED:

If you wish to directly give someone access to a Product and all its content and emails, you can add them directly from the DAP Admin screen (Users > Add/Edit).

You just need their email id and their first name (both of which they can change subsequently) to add them to a Product.

While adding them, you have the option of marking them as a “Paid” user by checking the “Mark as Paid” checkbox.

If you don’t check this check box, then they will be added as a “Free” user and get access only to “Free” resources (content/emails).

But if you check the “Mark as Paid” checkbox, then they will get access to all “Paid” content and emails, just like someone who is actually a “Paid” member.

A) Protecting Files Within WordPress

The fastest way to protect files is to upload them to your wordpress blog when you are writing a new post. All such files will be stored in a folder called “wp-content/uploads/….”.

Alternatively, you could also upload files directly using FTP, to the “wp-content/uploads/” folder and DAP is configured right off-the-shelf to protect any file inside the “wp-content/uploads/” folder.

B) Protecting Regular Web Site Files Outside of WordPress

1. Go to the following directory within the “dap” folder on your desktop:

dap > client > website

2. Open the .htaccess file in this folder.

3. In your web site’s root folder (where you have your home page – index.php or index.html)…

i) if you already have an existing .htaccess file., then open it and COPY the text from Step 2 above and PASTE it at the very end of this file.

ii) If there is no .htaccess in your root folder, then simply copy the file from Step 2 to your web site’s root folder.

That’s it.

TESTING:
Now add the link to your non-wordpress file to DAP from the DAP Admin Control Panel.

Then, open a different browser (not different window – a totally different browser – like, if you’re logged in as DAP admin in FireFox, open IE)  and try to access your file directly and see if DAP redirects you to the login screen.

If not, take a deep breath – it’s NOT DAP

It’s just that you missed something (or screwed something up .

Revisit the steps above, and if you still can’t figure it out, you might want to think about uploading the file to wordpress (see Section A above) .

But if you’d rather get this working, then just open a support ticket, and we’re standing by to help you

That’s it!

Now DAP already provides you with a built-in login form, at YourSite.com/dap/login.php

But if you want to put this form “within” your WordPress blog, so as to give your login form the same Look & Feel as the rest of your blog, all you need to do, is…

1) Create a WordPress “Page” (not ‘post’) with the text %%LOGIN_FORM%% in the body of the page, and a title of say, Login, and save the new page. If you used the text “Login” for the title, then the actual link to this page would be YourSite.com/blog/login

2) This page now shows up as “Login” along with the rest of your “pages” on your blog.

3) Go to DAP Admin > Config > Advanced (drop down). Scroll down to the field that says:

Location of your login page (eg., if using WordPress). Should start with a forward slash (`/`)

In the text box, enter the link to the login page from Step 1, minus the domain name. So, it would look like:

/blog/login

That’s it!

When someone clicks on the “Login” link, or tries to access a post that they are not authorized to, the user is redirected to the login page.

Related: Where is the Logout Link?

For Advanced Users Only

That means, if you read this post and don’t understand a word, then this is NOT for you.

For this to work, you must have already installed DAP WP LiveLinks.

Now, when someone comes to your wordpress blog, assuming you have already activated DAP LiveLinks, then none of the posts you have protected will even show up on the home page, or will show up if someone tries to visit them directly (say, from a bookmark or link in an email). Which means, as far as your visitor is concerned, those posts don’t even exist in your blog.

Now as powerful as this plugin is, from an SEO perspective, if your visitor (who is not a member, and one who is not logged in) can’t even see the post, then neither can Google. This means, if you do a blog-and-ping, when Google arrives at the permalink of your new post, because the post is protected, DAP will redirect Google to your login page. This means, you don’ get the benefit of SEO for your new post.

Also, from a “Curiosity” standpoint, if you protect all of the posts, then your visitor will only see a handful of non-protected blog posts.

So, giving them a “sneak-peek” of the post your home page as well as on the permalink, is a great way to get them excited about your content.

How to turn on Sneak-Peek

Go to DAP Admin > Config > WordPress Sneak-Peek

It is set to “N” (no) by default. Change this to “Y” and click on the “Update” button to save the change.

And then when they click on the “more” button to read the rest of the post, the full post is protected anyway, and they are presented with a login screen.

WARNING: VERY IMPORTANT IF YOU TURN ON SNEAK-PEEK

As soon as you turn on Sneak-Peek, DAP will show all content from your blog posts, but only up to the “More” tag. This means, if you don’t have a “More” tag in any of your content, then all of your blog posts will show to all users, regardless of whether they have access or not.

So, the most important thing here is this:

SNEAK-PEEK and MORE are INSEPARABLE.

If you do sneak-peek, you MUST include a “More” tag.

So when you create a WordPress blog post, split the post into two parts using the “More” tag. This creates a “public preview” portion of the actual post, that shows up on your blog’s home page and in the permalink when that post is displayed. To read the rest of the post, your visitor has to click on the “More” link, and that’s when depending on whether the user has access, the rest of the post will be displayed.

Q: I just made a test purchase. But DAP did not process the payment (or) did not add me as a member (or) is not creating a new member.

Make sure that the product name within DAP and the product name in your “buy” button (i.e., your shopping cart) are EXACTLY the same. Don’t just look at the two and say, “oh yeah, they’re the same”.We recommend “copying” the product name that you set up in DAP, and then “pasting” it when creating your “buy” button. If you are using Paypal, then this is the “Item Name” when you are creating your Paypal “buy” button. If you are using 1ShoppingCart, then this is the “Product Name” when creating a new product.

(Paypal users, skip ahead)

1ShoppingCart/ClickBank:

1) Make sure you have set up the “Email Order Processing” correctly.

2) Is your Cron Job dap-emailorder.php set up and running correctly?

3) Make sure you have not “removed” the 1Shoppingcart or ClickBank payment notification email from your server. Log in to your email server, and make sure that the email is still there, and also it needs to be “Unread”. If your email client (like Outlook or Thunderbird, or Gmail) already accessed it and marked it as read, then simply mark it unread, and the next time DAP runs (which should be in 10 minutes) it will pick up the email and process it.

Paypal Users:

1. If you are using Paypal IPN, then make sure you have enabled IPN within your Paypal account.

2. Make sure you put the correct IPN “notify_url” text in your button.

3. Make sure the Paypal button you set up is a “Buy Now” or “Subscribe” button. It SHOULD NOT be a “Add to Cart” button.

- Ravi Jayagopal

How do I protect a blog post?

1. First visit the blog post (permalink) in your browser, and then copy the full permalink (Ctrl-C).
2. Then within DAP Admin Control Panel, go to the Product you wish to add the post to.
3. Scroll down to the section “Add Files To File Sequence”.
4. In the left column, in the “Add a full URL” text box, paste the entire link to your blog post (a.k.a., permalink)

How do I protect a file?

Same as above if you know the full link t your file.

Or else, for files, you can also use the “File Browser” to browse through a folder on your web site, and next to each file, you will see an “Add” link. Clicking on that link will add that file to the product.

I have protected a blog post. But I can still view it without logging in.

1. 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).

2. After you set up DAP, did you visit the “Permalinks” section and click on the “Save” button at least once (even if you didn’t make any changes to your permalinks structure)?

3. Have you added the blog post to a Product? If you don’t add it to a DAP Product, the post or file won’t be protected.

Can I protect an entire category of posts at one go?

Yes, absolutely!

See Protecting An Entire WordPress Category.

Why do I see all of the protected posts on my blog’s home page? (OR) I don’t want the links to all my blog posts showing up on my blog

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.