Testing our new SS-Downloads plugin. It basically will require an email address before serving a specified file. Right now, I’m using a zip of the pre-release plugin for testing. I will update this to point to the latest version once it’s ready.
Should see a form or download link here.
Enter your email address to download ss-downloads.zip
Future plans:
- Option to require account creation (instead of just an email address). Done
- Option to email file as attachment instead of showing a link. Done
- Icons for files in template.
FAQ
Q: My downloads are incomplete, corrupt, or otherwise not downloading… especially large files.
A: This may be caused by a low memory issue or some other issue with serving the file through the getfile.php script. You can configure the plugin to simply redirect to the chosen file rather than serving it through the script by editing /ss-downloads/includes/setup.php and setting the GETFILE_REDIRECT value to true. The file will have to be served in a public web folder, and 733t hackers will be able to see the actual URL of the file.
Note: I’ve changed the GETFILE_REDIRECT to default to true. But if you have the inverse problem (the download is working, but you want to make it more secure by avoiding the redirect — which savvy users might be able to watch to get the URL of the file) you can set that value to false.
Edit:
Bob at 2bretired.com has a good writeup of how to clear out the download stats for your files if you want to do that sort of thing.
Brett says: April 15, 2011 at 2:54 am |
This plugin still seems to haev some bugs unfortuantely. specifically Firefox Browser bugs?
When trying to set up an mp3 for download – it works in IE (althought it always downloads as ‘getfile.mp3′ instead of the name of the file itself. But on Firefox, the site usually crashes when clicking the download link – or sometimes it downloads about 6 seconds of the mp3 – not the whole file. Any ideas? Would really love to get this working.
jason says: May 2, 2011 at 5:02 pm |
Sounds like a server/memory issue. Try the GETFILE_REDIRECT fix described in the update of this post.
Lagarrigue says: April 28, 2011 at 8:18 am |
Hi Jason, if one does want to put 5 different links on the same page they function all together, how to separate the links?
jason says: May 2, 2011 at 5:01 pm |
Lagarrigue, others have requested various features to address this. I have not figured out an elegant solution. In the meantime you can make one page that links to subpages with 1 download form each. This may be a cleaner setup for you.
If you are a coder, you can take a stab at editing the files in the templates and services folders to show the forms differently. You may want to pass an extra parameter after getting the email to tell the page which form submitted, and then have that template highlighted, etc.
If you have a more specific request, let me know.
eNCarolina says: April 28, 2011 at 9:35 pm |
Hi Jason,
I love your plugin, however I am not able to get the Download Full Report feature to work for the download stats. When I click the link it takes to a “Nothing Found” 404 page.
Any suggestions / ideas ?
Thanks!
Kammie says: April 29, 2011 at 11:12 pm |
Fantastic plugin! I’ve installed the plugin and everything seems to be working fine except that the “File Downloads” fields are not populating with any download details. However, the email addresses are showing up just fine in the “Collected Email Addresses” field.
Is there a setting that needs to be set for the report to work?
jason says: May 2, 2011 at 4:58 pm |
Hi, guys. I’m working on this problem and hope to have an update in the plugins repo soon. Thanks.
Bob says: May 2, 2011 at 6:43 pm |
The original errors I was getting was due to testing on my wamp localhost.
On my actual site I noticed once you submit your email the page remains with your “download is ready box”. Can this be reset.
Also during testing both “collected email address” and “file downloads” areas need to be cleared how do you clear these 2 box’s
Otherwise it works great,
Thanks, Bob
jason says: May 3, 2011 at 9:38 pm |
You address your second question in your follow up. Thanks for that.
RE the “download is ready box”, you can change the content of that box by editing the files in the template folder of the plugin. It uses a session variable to figure out if you have already submitted your email address (and so won’t ask for it again). So you have to close your browser and come back to retest the form.
If you want to show the download link only once per session, you’ll need to add code somewhere to unset that variable (I’d have to look up what it’s called).
jason says: May 3, 2011 at 9:53 am |
FYI, I pushed version 1.3.3 to the WP repository and it should be available shortly. This update fixes an issue with changing the “download” shortcode and also sets the GETFILE_REDIRECT constant to true by default.
This last change has security impacts on the locations of your files. So you may want to add this code to your functions.php file or similar:
define(“GETFILE_REDIRECT”, false);
Bob says: May 3, 2011 at 8:59 pm |
Jason,
After playing around with this plugin the “collect email” and “file download” needed to be cleaned out to start fresh I created a small post explaining to beginners how to use PHPmyadmin to clear these 2 tables at http://2bretired.com/wordpress/?p=1153
Jack says: May 10, 2011 at 11:45 am |
hey jason,
great work on this plugin. i’m having a slight issue. The plugin works great when I set it to display the download link, but if I set it up to email the link, whenever you click that link in the email you just get this:
“This file is protected. You need to enter an email address to gain access. Please contact us if this is unexpected. Back to homepage.”
I had multiple people test and it happens to everyone. I saw someone posted about this above, but didn’t follow up with any resolution.
Any ideas?
jason says: June 21, 2011 at 11:08 pm |
@Jack, one thing to note is that you have to use the same browser as the one you clicked on to open the file (it’s still looking for that session). If you turn off the GET FILE option in the settings, it should work in any browser then (because it won’t be sending traffic through the getfile.php script.)
hugo says: May 13, 2011 at 8:49 am |
hi, i m looking for W.P. function, like ” download before click AD”, the closest one I found is SS-Downloads. Will you add the function in the future? thx.
jason says: June 21, 2011 at 11:06 pm |
@Hugo, do you mean something like “click this ad to download _____”? I’m not a fan of that kind of trickery. The ad providers don’t like when you encourage false clicks like that. I don’t think I’ll be adding that feature any time soon.
admin says: August 2, 2011 at 8:14 am |
Hugo, do you want to show an ad to click on before downloading? That’s against most ad service TOS, so I wouldn’t program that. You might be able to figure out how to tweak this plugin to do that if you have some coding skillz.
Vee says: May 17, 2011 at 11:09 am |
Hi. I’m looking for a plugin where a customer can download/and print an order form to order products via snail mail. It sounds like your plugin would would do that?
jason says: June 21, 2011 at 11:05 pm |
It should work. But I would just put a link to the catalog unless you think it’s more valuable for your business to capture an email address than to get a catalog out.
Vee says: May 18, 2011 at 1:17 pm |
I’m gettig this error on the download page:
Warning: file_get_contents(http://mysite.com/wp-content/plugins/ss-downloads/templates/emailform.php?file=4v-zR6fc6f%2F9vaROBr%2FRtBct_hh.vBx&title=Order+Form&postid=321&ssdmsg=) [function.file-get-contents]: failed to open stream: HTTP request failed! HTTP/1.1 404 Not Found in /home/site/public_html/wp-content/plugins/ss-downloads/ss-downloads.php on line 165
jason says: June 6, 2011 at 11:31 am |
Check the /includes/setup.php file in the plugin and manually set the plugin directory constants.
Mark says: June 14, 2011 at 1:45 pm |
Hi, I’d love to give this a try. Looks very simple, easy to use. Problem is, when I activate it it appears to break the CSS on my blog–everything goes askew. Any hints on this?
jason says: June 21, 2011 at 11:04 pm |
@Mark, can you link to your site that is broken? Or let me know what theme you are using? Thanks.
Omar says: June 16, 2011 at 7:33 am |
I was testing out the Plug-in and it worked fine until I started to test it with different e-mails. It seems that it stores the e-mail that was put in first, so when I try to input a different e-mail I can’t. Even when I clear all history on my browser and go back, the download box still says “your download is ready”…Does this plug-in only allow one e-mail per computer? Anyways to fix this issue?
jason says: June 21, 2011 at 11:03 pm |
It uses PHP sessions to save that an email was already provided. This is so it only asks users once. To test it multiple times, you’ll have to kill all of your browser windows to clear the session. Then visit the site an try again.
JeLBee says: June 21, 2011 at 10:53 pm |
i can download the file even if i input a wrong email. It is much better to send the download link to the email provided or it is very much appreciated if you can make a “Subscribe RSS to Download”.
jason says: June 21, 2011 at 11:02 pm |
Yeah, we check for a valid format, but you can’t really validate the email unless you use the “send link to email” mode. Find that in the plugin settings.
nuzly says: June 24, 2011 at 2:39 pm |
Is it possible to show a counter stats on the frontend??
admin says: August 2, 2011 at 8:11 am |
Great idea. You could do this by editing the template (see the FAQ of 1.4.1). Insert the download counter like this (didn’t test): get_var(“SELECT COUNT(*) FROM $wpdb->ss_downloads WHERE file = ‘” . $wpdb->escape($file) . “‘”)?>
Paul Zagoridis says: July 9, 2011 at 9:44 am |
Jason thanks for the easy-to-use plugin. I know some people have problems with it, but for emailing a file to an email address it is perfect under FF, Chrome and Safari.
A feature requests
1) Can you increment the “Files downloads” section for email delivery too please? Emailing a file should count as a download.especially if there are 2 or more files available from a site. The wp_ss_download table should also populated so full report works.
2) Can you make the settings individually configurable via the shortcode? i.e. make some files available as email delivery [download "FileA.pdf" title="File A" delivery="email"] and other files delivered via email link [download "FileB.mp3" title="My audio gift" delivery="email-link"] and others via download [download "FileC.mp4" title="My video presentation" delivery="link-file"]
It makes sense to be able to over-ride every option from the config in the shortcode.
admin says: August 2, 2011 at 8:04 am |
RE #1 Good point.
RE #2 Good idea.
Not sure when I can get around to these.
Paul Zagoridis says: July 9, 2011 at 10:53 am |
After submitting an email address for send a link to file by email, the form resets to “Enter your email address to download …” Shouldn’t that say “Check your inbox for the link to download …”
admin says: August 2, 2011 at 8:07 am |
I’m hoping the new version fixes these. Could be some kind of server/plugin conflict (lots of them with this plugin).
Let me know if you still see them, and we’ll try to chat offline about what the cause might be.
Scott says: July 21, 2011 at 1:42 pm |
Is perfect for 1 file, but when trying to collect different email lists for different files, it can’t help me. It would be great if it had tabs to separate different files.
admin says: August 2, 2011 at 8:03 am |
Right. I haven’t figured out how I would want to do that. You’ll need to either keep each file on its own page or use a more robust plugin like http://www.paidmembershipspro.com to manage your subscriptions and file downloads.
Brian says: July 29, 2011 at 9:26 pm |
Hi,
I was wondering if you could check this page:
http://www.microtissues.com/blog/download-cell-types-white-paper/
Everytime I type in an email it just brings me back to the page asking for my email. Then after a couple times of plugging in random emails I can get the download link. Seems like something funky is going on. Any thoughts?
-Brian
admin says: August 2, 2011 at 8:02 am |
The plugin uses session variables to tell if an email has been entered. This is commonly available on most hosts, but maybe not on yours. This link might help you figure out a way to enable it. You can check your phpinfo(); to see if this is really what is going on too.
http://support.qualityunit.com/knowledgebase/general-questions/how-to-enable-session-support-for-php.html
Brian says: August 2, 2011 at 4:35 pm |
Any idea what I need to add to php.ini to get this to work?
That article was not that clear what I needed to add.
All I have in php.ini now is memory=20mb
I am using 1and1 as well.
Thank you for helping.
Paul Zagoridis says: August 2, 2011 at 12:20 am |
In case my website link is stopping my comments, I’ve removed it.
I was using 1.3.3 but have just updated to 1.4.1.
I’ll rerun the tests when I get a chance
admin says: August 2, 2011 at 8:00 am |
I’m behind on moderation. Thanks for trying 1.4.1.
Alfie says: August 15, 2011 at 1:33 pm |
Nobody else seem to have this fundamental error – I have the plugin installed, add the shortcode into the page (tried html and visual) but all I see on the finished web page is the text. The plug in definitely is activated, and i have deactivated all other plug ins, changed the theme and tried on 2 different servers – am i using it incorrectly? http://www.just-worldwide.com/portfolio-item/european-payers/
jason says: August 24, 2011 at 10:30 am |
Sometimes when you cut and paste [download file="http://www.arealurl.com"] the URL part becomes an tag link, which would break that.
Your example page is down for me or I might have more input.
Alfie says: September 20, 2011 at 7:22 am |
Here’s another demo page I’ll leave up with the shortcode added and the result. Any advice greatly appreciated. As aforementioned, have tried this on different themes, stripped away all the other plug ins, but still no joy.
http://www.just-worldwide.com/demo-page/
Alfie says: September 20, 2011 at 8:01 am |
Aha! seems obvious now, but for some reason the default shotcode had been changed to so i simply changed it to ‘download’ again and all is well. Great plugin!
Evan says: August 15, 2011 at 1:42 pm |
I installed this plugin in the sidebar of my wordpress site and everything works fine. The one issue I have noticed is that when you submit an email address it loads in a different page of my website before giving me the file download button. Is this a known issue and/or fixable?
jason says: August 24, 2011 at 10:29 am |
Hmmm. Some browsers do that.
You can move the download.php template into your theme folder. Then fix the require there to point to your wp-load.php. Then remove the target=”_blank” in the link.
Joe says: August 19, 2011 at 2:55 am |
Is there any Chance to add some more Fields to the Form, just to get a liitle bit more Details about WHO is requesting this Information?
I am using the FS Contactform right now, but i am missing your Functionality about the attached File.
So a mix of both would be FANTASTIC.
But some more Fields in your Plugin would be FANTASTIC as well.
Many Thanks in Advance,
Joe
jason says: August 24, 2011 at 10:26 am |
I’ll consider that for a future version, but don’t forsee having a lot of time to work on that. With a little php knowledge it would be an easy tweak for someone willing to do it. If someone does. I’ll post it here or (better yet) include it in the plugin.
jose says: August 23, 2011 at 5:00 pm |
Hi Jason,
I installed your plugin and everything seems to work fine until I click to download the file, it gives me a 403 Forbidden error.
I tried with two different files (one on the same server and the other in a different hosting location).
Here is a link where I’m testing it:
http://missionsbox.org/ss-download/
I tried adding both code suggestions into the funtions.php (one at the time), but it didn’t seem to make any difference. Currently everything is back to the original settings. If also tried changing the template method and the same error displays.
One more question, is it possible to add another field to the form (i.e. “name”).
Thanks
jason says: August 24, 2011 at 10:21 am |
Jose, check the file permissions on ss-downloads/services/getfile.php. It should be executable by the web server. Also, check that the file you are trying to serve is readable by the web server user.
You’ll want to look into using chmod and/or chown on the files on the server.
I hope that makes sense. I can’t get more specific without knowing your hosting setup. But that error message is pretty clear that either (1) the getfile.php script is not readable/executable or (2 – more likely) the files you are serving aren’t readable by the user apache uses to execute the getfile.php script.
jose says: August 24, 2011 at 11:46 am |
Hi Jason, I figured it out, its a .htaccess firewall I’m using that was blocking something, now its working, but it seem like there is an issue with link that have blank spaces (%20)…
jose says: August 24, 2011 at 11:47 am |
One more question, is it possible to add another field to the form (i.e. “name”).
car says: September 26, 2011 at 7:49 am |
Where are the emails stored? Can they be used for promotion for some newsletter plugin. Can emails be exported?
jason says: February 3, 2012 at 1:21 pm |
Goto Tools –> SS Downloads in your admin and you should see a list of email addresses. You can copy and paste the comma-separated list or export the full report to CSV and copy the email column, etc.
Geoffrey says: November 4, 2011 at 5:13 pm |
As with Jose, I would also like to have the option of a Name field. It will add a lot more leverage to marketing potential. Thanks.
jason says: February 3, 2012 at 1:20 pm |
Not timeline yet, but I’d like to get this out at some point. Might be a premium plugin.
joel says: November 21, 2011 at 3:53 pm |
How does the script send out emails? Would this count towards a hosting accounts emails sent on say GoDaddy?
jason says: February 3, 2012 at 1:19 pm |
It uses the mail function. May update this to use wp_mail, which you can use other plugins to make work with any POP/SMTP server (e.g. Google Mail). As written, it would count toward your limit.
joel says: November 23, 2011 at 4:37 pm |
I used your plugin for a new song release on Five Iron Frenzy’s website and after about 3k downloads I got this error:
“Could not instantiate mail function.
Warning: Cannot modify header information – headers already sent by (output started at /home/content/69/8479569/html/sites/fiveironfrenzy.com/site/wp-includes/class-phpmailer.php:586) in /home/content/69/8479569/html/sites/fiveironfrenzy.com/site/wp-includes/pluggable.php on line 934″
It gives me this same error on all the pages I try and use the plugin on. Any idea on what might be the problem?
jason says: February 3, 2012 at 1:18 pm |
Sounds like you hit some kind of email limit on your server.
Jeff says: November 26, 2011 at 8:40 pm |
Two questions:
1) Can I deliver (image) files *without* requiring a user to be signed in or enter an email address? I really don’t care if they are. I simply want to offer a download link (might require user verification later).
2) Will the shortcode work in an image lightbox? (My initial test indicates no, but hoping there’s a way to make it work?)
P.S. I’m particularly trying to get this to work with NGG (adding a download link in the image lightbox).
Mark says: December 29, 2011 at 6:22 pm |
very nice plugin thanks
Julia says: February 5, 2012 at 11:16 pm |
Hi, Do you have any plans for updating this plugin for wordpress 3.3? It looks like exactly what I need, but I am unable to get it to work on my website.
jason says: February 6, 2012 at 9:58 am |
I’ll test this out in 3.3 and try to get an update out there. Maybe this week. Thanks.
jason says: February 11, 2012 at 12:35 pm |
So I’ve tested on my 3.3 installs, and the plugin is working. If you give me some more information, I might be able to figure out what is going on.
Julia says: March 20, 2012 at 4:57 pm |
Hi Jason, I was delighted to see you updated this plug-in, but I still am having no success. I’m using WordPress 3.3.1. My shortcode is set for download, I am using the following syntax: [download file="htt://onecallonesolution.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/03/College-Students-Identity-Theft.pdf" title="CollegeStudents"] Where you have “filename.txt” in your instructions, I am putting the file URL of the media in my library–is that correct? There is nothing visible on my page: http://onecallonesolution.com/college-students-and-identity-theft/. I have tried changing every setting I am able. I am willing to purchase a plug-in, I would just really like to capture email addresses with my free downloads. thank you for any assistance.
jason says: March 20, 2012 at 8:18 pm |
You have a bad URL in the shortcode there, but I am not sure if that’s just a typo in the comment here. It should work with a full file URL to your media folder, e.g. I see you have other download related plugins installed. You might want to change the shortcode from “download” to something else via the SS Downloads settings page and try that.
Julia says: March 20, 2012 at 4:58 pm |
One more thing: I have also deleted and re-installed the plugin.
Julia says: March 21, 2012 at 9:20 am |
Jason, thank you for your input. I have changed the download shortcode five times and I still see nothing on my post page. I’ve checked the URL multiple times. Should I give up?
Casandra says: February 10, 2012 at 8:47 pm |
Hello Jason,
I’ve been trying to get this plugin to work on this site. (http://www.byot.nl/scriptie/)
but it just won’t show! I don’t understand because I tested it on my local webserver and that worked perfectly. I did exactly the same online and now it doesnt work (its just blank..), do you have any ideas?
Hope to hear from you soon.
jason says: February 11, 2012 at 12:33 pm |
Casandra, check the SS Downloads settings page to make sure that you have something entered for the shortcode.
Check the HTML tab of the page you put the shortcode on. Make sure that the file link didn’t paste with tags or anything. (Happens sometimes when copy/pasting a link into WP.)
Also, the plugin uses the WP HTTP API to load the form template. It’s possible your live server doesn’t support file_get_contents, curl, or any of the other technologies that would use.
Lisa says: February 16, 2012 at 8:52 am |
I’d like to implement this on a template so the authors don’t have to use a shortcode – only upload the pdf via a custom form field (that I’ve already set up). Is this possible?
jason says: March 20, 2012 at 8:14 pm |
Should be. You’d have something like this in your template where you want the form to show:
$file = get_post_meta($post->ID, “file”, true);
echo do_shortcode(“[download file='" . $file . "']“);
Venture Proof says: March 6, 2012 at 10:36 am |
Please tell me how to change the appearance of the boxes and the size of the text. They are just too big at the moment on our website, but changing the code doesn’t seem to have had any effect.
Thank you!
admin says: March 6, 2012 at 11:15 am |
You should be able to do it through CSS. Find the style.css of your active theme and add lines like this to it:
#ss-downloads {padding: 2px;}
#ss-downloads h3 {font-size: 1em;}
Venture Proof says: March 7, 2012 at 7:34 am |
I’ve tried to do that but it hasn’t had any effect on the boxes that are displayed. They just look very out of place on my website at the moment, and need to be smaller and styled a bit differently.
Please can you run me through the steps of doing this. I’m useing pagelines framework, and can therefore add code to Custom Code.
jason says: March 7, 2012 at 10:13 am |
Try using the !important flag like this:
#ss-downloads {padding: 2px !important;}
#ss-downloads h3 {font-size: 1em !important;}
There may be a custom.css or similar in that theme where you should place it instead of style.css. I’m not familiar with that theme.
Without seeing the actual site, I can’t give you more detailed help. If you link to the form on your site, I might be able to give you the CSS to try.
alaiksander says: March 8, 2012 at 5:43 am |
Hi Jason, I really love your plugin. But currently I’m using wordpress 3.3.1 and I still get the getfile.php problems for my downloaded files. I can simply rename the downloaded files to its real name and they do work, but It’ll confuse my average visitors. I did the fix, but it failed me. My files are in exe, zip, pdf, doc and rar. Thanks
jason says: March 20, 2012 at 8:15 pm |
Sorry, I can’t understand your problem. Can you paste the error you are getting?
Ian says: March 23, 2012 at 12:23 pm |
Can you explain how to work with files located outside the web directory?
I have made a new folder called ‘files’ that’s at the same level as ‘public_html’ and put my download ‘script.pdf’ in it.
What do I put in the shortcode for this to work?
jason says: March 27, 2012 at 11:20 am |
Not possible in this version. I will take it into consideration for a future version. The plugin is due for a rewrite.
buddha says: April 1, 2012 at 9:30 pm |
This plugin kicks ASS!!!! So simple yet perfectly formed. You have saved us a ton of money by having this functionality on our websites as opposed to signing up for an email harvesting platform like topspin. Please send me a donation link if you have one. thanks again!
jason says: April 2, 2012 at 11:06 am |
Thanks, BUddha. Glad you like it. There is a donate button at the bottom of this page:
http://www.strangerstudios.com/wordpress-plugins/ss-downloads/
gg says: March 25, 2013 at 3:02 am |
where’s the live demo? ((
Jason Coleman says: March 25, 2013 at 12:50 pm |
Sorry about that. We had the plugin deactivated. The live demo is back.
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