As a courtesy to our customers, we offer a free installation service, where we will install DAP on your site for free.

However, many people are confused by what “Free Installation” means. So this article is to give you more details about that.

Installation -vs- Setup

To give you a real-world example, think of “DAP Installation” similar to “Delivering the boxed TV set to your doorstep”. That’s it!

We won’t take it out of the box, hook it up to your cable box, set up your channels, set up your DVR, hook up your game console, DVD player, Roku box, etc. All of those things fall under “Setup & Configuration”. If you want us to do it all for you, then check out our “Membership Site In A Box” package that comes with “Concierge” sessions to help you set it all up.

What Free Installation Includes

• We will upload all DAP files to your server
• We will activate the dap plugin on one WordPress blog (the DAP-WP-LiveLinks plugin)
• Activating this plugin will create all of the dap tables in your WordPress database
• We will setup the Cron job(s) for you within your web hosting cPanel.
• If we see any hosting related configuration or installation issues, we will do our best to resolve them, if they are even resolvable (99% of the time, they are).
• We will then send you your new DAP Admin Email id and Password via the same support ticket you opened for installation.

That’s it. There’s nothing else involved in the free installation that we perform.

What Free Installation DOES NOT Include

• Installation or setup or configuration of your theme (like OptimizePress or Thesis)
• Installation, setup or configuration of other plugins
• Troubleshooting of your current WordPress installations
• Troubleshooting issues with any previous membership plugins that you may be using
• Doing an “Overview” of your web site and giving you ideas about what can or cannot be done using DAP
• etc… etc… but you get the idea

Hope this helps clarify what you’re getting as part of your purchase.

Please remember that get get only one free installation, regardless of which license you buy.  Additional installations may be purchased at http://DigitalAccessPass.com/buynow.php#installation

If you want us to do it all for you, then check out our “Membership Site In A Box” package that comes with “Concierge” sessions to help you set it all up.

Question: You ask what to do if your host does not support cron jobs?

Short answer: Fire them and get a better host.

Ok, the basic idea of a cron jobs is that it allows you to run scheduled tasks, that run automatically, frequently, silently, in the background, without requiring manual intervention.

DAP uses cron jobs to do things like…

• Send out autoresponder emails
• Send out broadcast emails
• Manage your outgoing queue of emails so that you can stay within your cheap web host’s strict hourly email sending limits
• Process and manage affiliate data & commissions , and
• Do some clean up jobs

Any membership script worth more than $1, should ask you to set up cron jobs for sending out emails. You couldn’t possibly send out an email blast to even 100 members in real time. If your membership script doesn’t require you to set up a cron job, then they’re worth absolutely nothing.

But DAP requires you to set up a cron job to do all of the tasks above.

And even the cheapest of the cheapest web hosts will allow you to set up a cron job.

If yours doesn’t, seriously you have only 2 choices…

1. Stick to your pathetic host, and lose the ability to use powerful scripts like DAP
2. Or do the smart thing and move to a better host. There are plenty of good ones out there, and there are a few we recommend highly, and they’re very inexpensive.

The choice is pretty obvious, no?

Here’s how you can move an existing DAP installation from one host  – or domain – to another.

• Log in to your web hosting control panel, go to “phpMyAdmin”, select your WordPress database (which is where the DAP tables are also installed, by default)

• Do an “Export” of just the DAP tables. Select the “SQL” option and select “Save as File”. All DAP database tables start with the text “dap_”. Save this file on your desktop – let’s say you call it “dapexport.sql” (it could also be “dapexport.txt” – does not matter what the exact extension is – .txt or .sql).

• Make a back up of the dap-config.php file (located in the “dap” directory on your old site/domain) on your desktop

• At your new site, install WordPress
• Copy the database info from your new blog’s “wp-config.php” to the “dap-config.php” file stored on your desktop.
• Then log in to your web hosting control panel of your new site, go to “phpMyAdmin”, select your WordPress database, go to the “SQL” tab, open the export file from above (dapexport.sql), copy the contents, paste into the SQL tab and hit “Go”. All dap data from your old site is now on your new site.
• Upload all dap files to your new site (don’t do full installation – just upload the files).
• Also upload the LiveLinks files to wp-content/plugins/ .
• Upload the new dap-config.php file from your desktop to the “dap” folder on your new site.
• Log in as WP admin, and activate the LiveLinks plugin. It should give you a warning that DAP is already installed. That’s ok, that’s what we want it to say.
• That’s it. DAP is now moved over from your old site to your new site.
• Log into your DAP Dashboard using your old DAP admin login info, and you’re all set.

Minimum Web-Hosting Requirements

• 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)
• Some flavor of Unix/Linux server operating system
• Preferably Apache web server.

Please note that as a potential DAP user, you don’t have to know what any this means.

These are commonly available on almost all decent web hosts. So it’s ok if you don’t understand a single word from the above list

Also, if your current host does not have any of these features, 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.

Windows -vs- Linux

DAP works right out of the box, flawlessly, on all flavors of Unix/Linux.

But when it comes to Windows servers, while DAP has been found to work on some installations, it all depends on the kind of Windows setup. We have spent way too much time troubleshooting Windows installations, so we do not recommend Windows-based servers. If you must use DAP on a Windows-based server, unfortunately, you’re on your own. We’re unable to support such installations.

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

But as in any industry, some hosts are just outdated, run old and outdated 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 plain 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.

VPS Hosting

LiquidWeb

If keeping your site(s) running almost all the time, and having insanely great support from your web host,  are both important to you, then you should go with a VPS server from LiquidWeb. For about $50 a month, you can get yourself a great server, with terrific up-time and support. And did we say support is crazy good?

Shared Hosting

If you can’t afford the $50 a month for a VPS server, or don’t see the value of very high site availability or great support, then the next best option is shared hosting, where you share a server with other business owners. Not all shared hosts are made equal. And that’s why we highly recommend the following two web hosts.

1) HostGator

2) HostMonster & Blue Host: We think they might just be two different names for the same hosting service owned by the same parent company. Feel free to correct us if we’re wrong.

NOT Recommended (“FAIL”)

DreamHost

We’ve recently added DreamHost to our “NOT RECOMMENDED” list, as we’ve had so many issues with them on our own various web sites, many that aren’t even running DAP, and are simple WordPress blogs – some are actually plain HTML web sites, and the web sites go down all the time, emails get delivered very late, many emails go missing.

This has been happening on too many of our sites and this has gone on for far too long for us to tolerate. A majority of our sites have been hosted with DreamHost for about 5-6 years now, and we’re now finally pulling the plug on all of them, one by one. We’re moving all of our web sites over to LiquidWeb.

And the biggest joke with Dreamhost, is that when any of your web sites hosted on DreamHost go down, and you go to their site so you can open a support ticket, you’ll almost always find that even their own web site – dreamhost.com – is down! And they always use a different domain (dreamhoststatus.com – maybe hosted at Hostgator for all we know, LOL!) to notify people that various servers or services are down. Would you trust a web host that can’t even keep their main site up and running? We certainly don’t. So 1.5 thumbs down for DreamHost.

GoDaddy

GoDaddy is great for registering your domain names. For hosting? Not so much.

We’ve seen many issues with GoDaddy-hosted sites. Their email systems don’t work consistently on all servers. It works great for some, while some of our other users have reported that even simple admin notification emails from DAP don’t get sent correctly. To compound the issue, Godaddy queues up even real-time emails on their end, and only send them out as batches. Which means even instant “Thank You” emails sent to your buyers with their membership login info, may not get sent for a couple of hours, even though DAP has actually sent them out, but are being intercepted and put on a queue by Godaddy to be sent out later in a “batch”.

The other big issue we’ve seen with GoDaddy is that they don’t allow the use of a PHP library called “imap”, which is a very important library for doing email-based order processing. So this means, if you’re using 1SiteAutomation.com (or any other private label of 1ShoppingCart) and wish to do automated cancellations using DAP’s email order processing, this will not be possible if you’re using Godaddy. So bottom-line: Do not use Godaddy if you have a choice. And even if you must, then do not use GoDaddy if you’re planning to use 1SiteAutomation (or any other private label of 1ShoppingCart).

1and1

We wholeheartedly recommend AGAINST using 1and1 for your web hosting. These guys are so stuck in the 90′s, and provide you with some lousy tools.

For instance, the process for setting up a cron job on 99.9999% of the other hosts takes about 2 minutes, because it’s all point-and-click using a browser.

On 1and1, if you see the tutorial they’ve provided at http://faq.1and1.com/scripting_languages_supported/cron_jobs/3.html , they’ve made it so terribly complicated, that it would take us too much time just to setup a simple cron job! And spending 20-30 minutes for something that normally takes less than 1 minute on other hosts, is simply NOT worth our time. So if you’re on 1and1, we won’t be able to set up cron jobs for you for free. We would have to charge you to set it up for you, so just be aware of that. Two Thumbs DOWN for 1and1.

If Your Host Is Not Listed Here

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

These just happen to be the ones we have used, have done countless installations on, for our DAP users, and highly recommend if you have the option of picking a new web host.

This is exactly why we offer a 30-day money-back guarantee when you purchase DAP – so that you can 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.

How to get DAP installed for FREE!

(Same information below is required for paid installations & upgrades too)

Go to http://www.DigitalAccessPass.com/support/ , open a ticket (do not send us the information by email), and enter the information below into 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 __________

Also see: What “Free Installation” Means

WAIT! Did you know that you get FREE INSTALLATION of DAP? But if you must to do it yourself, then here you go

1. Download & Unzip Files

Log in to your member’s area at http://DigitalAccessPass.com/dap/ . Download the following 2 files…

a) dap.zip

b) DAP-WP-Livelinks.zip

Unzip the two zip files (separately) to your desktop. You should see 2 folders named dap and DAP-WP-LiveLinks.

WARNING: After you unzip the folders, you should NOT see a “dap” folder within the “dap” folder, or a “DAP-WP-LiveLinks” folder within the “DAP-WP-LiveLinks” folder. If you do, then in both cases, it is the inside “dap” folder or the inside “DAP-WP-LiveLinks” folder that’s important. Get rid of the outer one, and upload only the inner “dap” folder and the innert “DAP-WP-LiveLinks” folder, as explained below.

2. Upload Files

a) Upload the entire dap folder on your computer, to the root of your web site. The root directory is where your web site’s home page is usually located. This directory also goes by the name “public_html” or “www” or “htdocs”.

WARNING: You may not rename the dap folder to anything else. The name of the folder MUST be dap, and regardless of where your blog is (in the main folder, or in a sub-folder), the dap folder must be in your root directory.

Once this is done, the dap folder should be accessible by at http://www.Example.com/dap/ – but wait – don’t visit that link yet.

b) Upload the entire DAP-WP-LiveLinks folder (including the folder too) to your WordPress plugins directory, which is wp-content/plugins/

3. Activate Plugin

Log in as WordPress admin, go to the “Plugins” page, and activate the DAP-WP-LiveLinks plugin. Just activating the plugin installs the DAP tables in the same database as your WordPress blog.

If there are any errors, you will see them on your screen. If not, you will see a message that says that installation is complete, with just one final step remaining (see below).

You will also see the email and password for the DAP Admin account that has just been created for you.

There is no need to log in separately to the DAP Admin Control Panel, as you have already been logged in as DAP admin during the installation.

But save this DAP admin login info for future reference.

4. Permalinks Update (final step)

Within the WordPress admin control panel, go to “Settings > Permalinks”.

Under the section “Customize Permalink Structure”, pick any option other than “Default“.

IMPORTANT: Regardless of whether you made any changes on this Permalinks page or not, you MUST click on “Save Changes”.

REPEAT: Don’t forget to click on “Save Changes” whether you changed the permalink structure or not.

5. Access DAP

You will now see a new link on your WordPress Admin Menu  (bottom left, below “Settings”) called “DigitalAccessPass”. Click on that link to access your DigitalAccessPass Admin Control Panel.

6. Setting Up Cron

This step is not required to just get started with using and learning DAP. But it is required when you are ready to start sending out autoresponder and broadcast emails, or processing affiliate commissions. Also required if you’re doing email-order processing of recurring payments through 1shoppingcart or 1SiteAutomation.

It is critical that the cron job(s) is setup before you go live. So click here for the instructions.

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

See “Minimum web-hosting requirements”

What web hosts to you recommend?

See “DAP-Certified Web Hosts”

I’m getting an error during installation

See this post for more details about errors .

How can I avail of Free Installation?

See “Free Installation”

How do I setup Cron?

Setting up Cron Jobs

All about Cron Jobs

Your host does not support Cron Jobs

Updating your installation of DAP is very easy.

1. Download newest version of DAP files (dap_vXX.zip) from your member page
2. Unzip contents of the file to your desktop (or somewhere on your hard disk)
3. Overwrite the contents of the dap folder on your web site with the contents of the new dap folder on your desktop
4. If you’re logged in as DAP Admin, log out
5. Log in as DAP Admin and follow the instructions on the screen (you’ll be asked to click on a link to start the upgrade).

That’s it!

- Ravi Jayagopal

NOTE: If you are using WordPress, then click here for instructions on how to install DAP as a WordPress Plugin.

This documentation below is only for installing DAP on a Non-WordPress, plain HTML web site.

But you don’t need to be doing this!

Did you know you get free installation along with your purchase of DAP? Yes, even if you are only trying out the free trial and haven’t paid us a dime!

But for some reason, if you do not wish to take us up on the free offer, and wish to do it yourself, then here are the instructions.

We’ve tried to make DAP installation extremely simple. To do a full installation of DAP (non-WordPress version), it will take about 15-20 minutes.

Uploading the files

Download dap.zip from the members area:

Unzip to your desktop. You should see a folder named dap

Upload the entire dap folder on your computer, to the root of your web site. The root directory is where your web site’s home page is usually located. This directory also goes by the name “public_html” or “www” or “htdocs”.

Once this is done, the dap folder should now be accessible by typing in http://www.Example.com/dap/ – but wait – don’t visit that link yet.

Creating the Database

You will first need to create a database for DAP to use and store its data. So log in to your web host control panel, go to the “MySQL Databases” section, create a new database, then create a new user (with password), then finally make sure you “Add” the newly created database user to the newly created database (to give the user access to create, read, update and delete data from the database).

Note down the new database name, username and password.

Installing DAP

Visit http://YourSite.com/dap/install/

Fill out the form there with the above database details.

Put in “localhost” for the database host name (unless your host has specifically asked you to use something else).

Submit the form.

That should create the dap-config.php file within your dap folder.

And you’ll see a series of messages about how the installation went.

That’s it for the basic DAP installation. You just need to set up the cron jobs to complete installation.

Updating .htaccess File

Add the following text to the .htaccess file in your root directory. [NOTE: If you don't already have one, then simply copy the .htaccess file from /dap/client/website/ to your root directory]

#Paste this at the very end of your .htaccess file
#in your web site’s root folder

<IfModule mod_rewrite.c>
#dap
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} -f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !dapclient.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/dap/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !(.*)(\.php|\.css|\.js|\.jpg|\.gif|\.png|\.txt)$
RewriteRule (.*)   /dap/client/website/dapclient.php?dapref=/$1&plug=wp&%{QUERY_STRING}  [L]
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-f
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !-d
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !dapclient.php
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/dap/
RewriteCond %{REQUEST_FILENAME} !(.*)(\.php|\.css|\.js|\.jpg|\.gif|\.png|\.txt)$
RewriteRule (.*)   /dap/client/website/dapclient.php?dapref=/$1&plug=wp&%{QUERY_STRING}  [L]
</IfModule>

Setting Up the Cron Jobs

See this link to set up the cron jobs.

That’s it!

For support, open a ticket at http://www.DigitalAccessPass.com/support/