WordPress digital downloadable products
Download Monitor Plugin for WordPress digital downloadable products

Download Monitor Plugin for WordPress digital downloadable products | UpTig

Download Monitor Plugin for WordPress digital downloadable products | UpTig

In this tutorial, I’m going to show you to use the WordPress download manager Download Monitor Plugin for WordPress digital downloadable products. It’s a plugin in the repository.  It’s really simple to use it allows you to protect your PDF downloads and in fact videos or zips or whatever you want to protect. You can protect it with this plugin you can track how many times something is downloaded you can limit the number of times it’s downloaded and a bunch of other stuff.

We’re getting started right now. Hi, guys welcome back to another article it’s born from WP Learning Lab we hope you get better at WordPress so you can earn more for yourself for your clients and for your business we haven’t done.

So yet click subscribe I click the bell notification icon so you don’t miss anything and with that out of the way let’s install this download manager and start protecting your downloads I’ll see in the screen capture to install the download manager first we head over to plugins.

And then we click on add new I’m going to search for download manager so the wordpress developer manager. I like to use is the one on the top left there is a premium version and a free version the free version does everything I need and I’m going to show you what I need.

And I’m going to show you how you can do it if you need other things the download monitor may have that as a free option or you may just have to splurge for the premium if you can’t find one that does it for free. But the free version that’s a lot for the download manager here.

And I click on install and then activate and they come with a splash screen for the manager to promote some downloads some add-ons if you want them you don’t need them probably because there’s a download section at it with a whole bunch of features. So the first thing we’re going to do is actually add a document to the download monitor it’s going to click on add new and I’m gonna type in service contract PDF you can add a description.

If you want to now I can drag and drop the file we want to upload into this dotted dashed box area over here and I’m going to just drag and drop my file over to there if you drop it here it’s going to add it to your regular media library what you don’t want in this case. So I’m going to drop it right into this box over here uploads it there adds the file up here we also have the option of browsing the actual website.

So if click on browse this is the root of our website so we can actually find files here if that’s where they exist and add those to the download now that we have this file uploaded our next step is setting some options down at the bottom we can include a very number if we want a linked label. The file size which had actually ordered the text so you don’t really need to add this you don’t have to enter anything here.

Download Monitor Plugin for WordPress digital downloadable products

And then allow access you can choose who has access to this download by default it adds in all visitors you can choose a different user group on your site even membership levels if you have them the page template every document that exists here or that we create here can have a page template as well to be viewed on a page I don’t really use this option because.

I don’t want people to really view the page I just want them to download what they’re downloading under the lock options tab we have a couple of ways to lock the PDF.  So the first one they must agree to terms so you put in terms title and have the conditions here checkbox label this would be something like I agree these first two are self-explanatory.

But they have to then check this box besides I agree before they can download the file you can have a password lock. So you give the password to your friends you enter the password here then you give it to your friends or your family they have to enter.

That password before they can download CAPTCHA lock you have to install reCAPTCHA which is just another plugin simple and install and download there’s really no settings to it you just install it and then it has a CAPTCHA that people have to solve before.

They can download when all those settings are set click on publish. And then head over to all files click on there and we see our new file right here with a shortcode that we can copy this column which currently has nothing in it is the Downloads column. So as this file is downloaded you’ll see numbers appearing here but first, we have to embed it in the page as people can actually find it and download it.

So I’m gonna head over to a page gonna make a new one actually just gonna call it service contract and I’m gonna paste the shortcode into the editor here then click on publish then.

The actual URL to the PDF so if we hover over this and we look at the URL in the bottom corner over the browser it doesn’t show the URL of the PDF so people can’t hotlink directly to it. People can’t share that URL friends are posted on their website it protects your download essentially this icon is an Adobe Acrobat icon you can actually change that if we head back into the editor for the service contract.

And we go to the very bottom click on the icons tab then we can choose a different icon for that if we want if we head back to the package settings you see it auto-populated the file size like. I said we don’t have to populate that so I’m going to leave all that as it is and I’m going to download just by clicking on it.

The download link and now we’re gonna see if we head back into all files we’re gonna see a number updated to the number one because it’s been downloaded one time right here now this might be you testing it and saying you don’t want that test to show up in the results. So we go back into the editor scroll down to the very bottom and we change this download count back to zero or even just delete.

Download Monitor Plugin for WordPress digital downloadable products

It clicks on update click on all files again and now we have this back down to zero so that’s how we add assets to our download manager this can be PDF files audio files video files images text documents just any kind of asset that you want to monitor and protect now you might be adding a lot of stuff in here. So there’s also the option to add tags so you can add certain tags save you have a course content tag.

And a free content tag you can label things in specific ways and then keep things organized in the back end of your site same with categories just for the organization in the history tab if we head over to that it shows who downloaded it and when they download it. And who was just an IP address so it doesn’t really tell you exactly who the person is but it tells you the IP and when it was then we also have our settings tab so here we have permission denied message for some packages like we saw earlier you can choose which user segment is able to download?

So all visitors would never see this message but if you made that download only available to logged-in people they would see this message here. And you can update it as you need to server file browser when we’re uploading the file we click on a little browse tab that showed the root of our website this is where you can set that or change that.

So maybe you have a bunch of people working on your site but you don’t want them to see the root you might have a folder that just contains PDFs maybe it’s in the public HTML file forward-slash PDF and now they only have access to that folder or maybe it’s called assets.

And that’s where you have all the assets for the download manager then you can also set who has access to it by default only the administrator but you can have all user roles on your sites be able to access that file browser you can choose to sanitize. The file name by clicking this if there are illegal characters in the file name they’ll be removed you can set the download speed to limit the impact on your server resources you can block certain IP addresses if you want you can enable the resumption of downloads.

So if they get a partial download they can keep going. And we have output buffering which helps with server resources and visitor satisfaction open in a new browser tab if they click on the download link CAPTCHA settings if you want to use a CAPTCHA disable JavaScript you’d only really use this if something goes wrong or if these scripts are ready on your site if using a font awesome plug-in, for example, you don’t want this to load font-awesome as well so just disable that by checking that box.

Download Monitor Plugin for WordPress digital downloadable products

On the login page, you can choose the login page here that’s where they’ll be redirected when they have to login register page dashboard page. And then include the packages in the RSS feed if you want that’s usually something I never do so that is the free version of the plugin there are some add-ons there’s a little add-ons tab here you may or may not need them I find that I’ve never needed them because the free version does so much for monitoring. And protecting your downloads.

But if you need some of these add-ons just have a quick read through what they are and maybe some of these are waiting for me there’s quite a few of them and a lot of them are paywalls as well so they can force people to pay first before they access your download which is a membership thing and I don’t know why you want to do it through this plugin versus a real membership plug-in but maybe that’s how you want to do it.

So I’ll be up to you and all these downloads and add-ons are here and there’s quite a few of them. So chances are this developer is making a Bitcoin which means that they will likely keep developing it which is always a concern for plugins that go out of date. And the developer just lost interest and they don’t do it anymore. But if someone’s livelihood is associated with that plugin they’re going to keep updating it that’s one of the benefits of a plug-in having a premium option it keeps the developer more interested and more tied to the development of both the free version.

And the premium version that’s how easy it is to start protecting your downloads. I hope this article helps you if you have any questions or run it any problems please leave your questions or comments down below this article if you haven’t done so yet click Subscribe. So you don’t miss anything and next up is clicking one of these articles that appear on the right-hand side so you can get even better at WordPress and until next time keep crushing it I will see you the next time.

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Download Monitor Plugin for WordPress digital downloadable products