dtynan

I don’t believe there is any way to use the template functionality of Download Monitor to modify how the EBD link is displayed. In the old old version of Download Monitor there was some sort of “format” feature and EBD does allow you to use that in your shortcode if you’re using the old DM (which is not supported and way old). That said, I can’t remember at all what the “format” thing did … may be completely unrelated to what you’re trying to do.

Anyway, if your problem is simply that the download button looks weird and like the text is sort of vertical rather than horizontal, then it can be fixed with some css (it’s actually happening because of a conflict in the css names between EBD and your theme probably). If you point me at your page I can tell you what to change to fix it, or you can just look at the CSS of the button and you’ll see that the classname(s) on it are already in use by your theme (probably) and thus the conflict.

Oh I think I finally understand what you mean. You want to do a single download but have it display a checkbox next to it. Yeah it doesn’t do that. I don’t have any php mod to do that either. Sorry.

I’m sorry, I don’t understand what it you’re doing or asking exactly. It sounds like you’re maybe not quite using things correctly but have kind of adapted around it maybe.

So, just to be clear, there is no description that gets displayed. There is only the file title (meaning the title of the file from Download Monitor). While Download Monitor has fields for file description, that does not appear in any way using EBD.

The way EBD works, you fill in the form and hit submit and (assuming you chose ‘inline’ or ‘both’) then it gives you a link to download the file and that link is the file title. That’s for single download.

Or, if you’re doing checkboxes for multiple downloads, then EBD will show several file titles with checkboxes next to each. You fill in the form, hit submit, and then several links will appear (one for each file you checked) and each of those links will allow you to download that file and the link text itself is the file title.

I’m not sure where you’re getting file description … maybe you are typing that into the wordpress page itself or something like that? Or maybe you’ve gone way back in these support tickets and found where I detailed several php changes one could make to email-before-download.php to cause the file description to appear?

Not sure…

I looked at your page. It looks like you have one form with a bunch of fields and that form says it’s for downloading an ebook. You have a second form further down that just asks for an email address and that form is for subscribing to a newsletter.

As far as I could see, the first form is not Contact Form 7 / Email Before Download. I’m guessing you moved on to try something else and that is why it is that way. I did try it out and it did stuff that I didn’t recognize — there were no checkboxes, the response after submitting the form (which was submit in a strange way) was javascript that caused the browser to navigate to a new page, and result was some of weird pdf viewer in the page. Or something like that…

The second form does appear to be a CF7 form, but as far as I can tell it’s not set up to be the EBD form with checkboxes & downloads and such.

Anyway, generally speaking, the way the multi-download works for EBD is that there is a list of files with a checkbox next to each one. The user checks the files he wants to get, fills in his email address (and whatever else) in the form, and hits submit. Then, if EBD is set to ‘inline’ (or to ‘both’), the page will update in-place (via ajax) and a list of links will appear that the user can click on to download those files which he had put a check next to. Or, if EBD was set to ’email’ (or to ‘both’) then the user would receive an email to the email address he put into the form. That email would contain links to download each of the files the user had put a check next to (or, if you chose to do attachments, then those files would already be attached to the email). Note that there is no need for the user to fill the form in again between file downloads. If you were seeing that behavior then you weren’t set up correctly, or more likely, something was interfering with the way the plugin works .. you seem to have a lot of stuff on that page, so that would be my guess.

Anyway, regardless, there is no way to make a browser download multiple PDF files sequentially using javascript or something without things getting really strange .. for one, the browser might display the pdf in a PDF viewer so who knows what kind of weirdness that would cause. Essentially, the user has to click on the links to download the files, but he only needs to fill in the form once (assuming this is all happening on one page and all he downloads are in there as checkboxes … forms on other pages would require the user to fill in those other forms)

I’m not quite sure what you’re asking .. can you elaborate?

Ok, I tried the link that you provided (the client’s website link) and I see the problem. You need to edit the CF7 form that you created and change the field name from “email” to “your-email”. It must be your-email or else it won’t work. Once you fix that it should work.

That said, be aware that aside from “your-email”, EBD also expects the field for the person’s name to be “your-name” and for there to just be that one name field, whereas you have “firstname” and “lastname” as fields. Additionally, you have a bunch of other fields you’ve added. That’s fine as far as things working, but just be aware that those fields and their submitted form data will not be listed as separate fields in the CSV (assuming you click the “Download CSV” link or whatever it’s called at the top of the EBD Settings in the wordpress admin). Those fields & their submitted values do get into that file, but they show up as one big chunk of XML in the “posted_data” field or something like that. Basically, EBD is hard-coded for a few fields to be in the CSV file .. stuff like the download file name, the your-name field, the your-email field, and so on. Since it doesn’t know about your additional fields it doesn’t list those separately and instead just clumps them all together in that XML blob. So, if you want to actually get at any of that data to do something with it then you’ll either need like a little script to process the CSV file and de-XML that stuff and write out a new CSV file (or whatever). Or, you could write a script to pull the data directly from the tables in the database (but you’ll still have to de-XML the posted_data so it’s basically the same thing). I’ve seen some people use a plugin that allows you to save and retrieve CF7 submitted form data and that seems to work for folks. That might be something you want to try if you need to get at those additional fields. I believe it was Contact Form DB that they were using. Anyway, hopefully all of that sort of makes sense…

Ok, on the 403 error on the other system it sounds like you’ve probably just got access to that directory blocked in your webserver configuration files or in an .htaccess. Most likely it’s an .htaccess file that got dropped into your wp-content/plugins directory and it probably allows localhost (127.0.0.1) to access the plugins, but probably doesn’t let anyone else (like people trying to access from over the internet). You probably just need to find and get rid of that file. If you don’t see any .htaccess in that directory or in wp-content then it may be in the webserver config files themselves. There’s also a small chance that your web-hosting company may have installed mod-security or some similar type of Apache plugin that is configured to make things more secure & maybe they have a rule in it to block access to the plugins directory from outside systems. Anyway, it’s something like that .. you’ll just have to poke around & try and track down where the setting is.. Note that the vast majority of wordpress plugins just interact with the admin through the wordpress admin menus, or via shortcodes. Not very many expect the end user to directly access their files in the plugins directory, so that may explain why all the other plugins seems to work fine (and, as I said, I suspect the webserver configuration allows access to the plugins via 127.0.01 / localhost, just not from other systems).

You need to edit the CF7 form that you created and change it so that the field name is “your-name” (for the name field) and “your-email” for the email field. Currently yours are something like text-794 and email-800, which won’t work.

As a side note, on the PDF download problem that sometimes appears in Chrome, one of the things that one will notice when it happens is that Chrome tries to download the PDF twice in quick succession with one of the downloads being immediately canceled. Chrome then downloads a chunk of the PDF file but appears to have problems with the Byte-Range and issues tons and tons of download requests but to the user it looks like it’s stuck downloading the PDF and doesn’t look like it will ever finish …… in reality it does actually eventually download the file if you wait long enough & have enough memory, but it can take many minutes. It’s unclear if the download cancelation issue is the cause of the actual download problem or if it’s a separate issue. If it is the cause, then it has been fixed in the development version of Chrome (which is called Chromium) under this bug in their tracking system – https://bugs.chromium.org/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=587709
Eventually bugs fixed in Chromium make their way into Chrome. That bug was fixed in September (2016). I didn’t want to invest much time figuring out their releases and how fixes matriculate into Chrome’s source tree, but I did take a very quick look. If I remember correctly, the fix made it into a Chromium release that is being tested now or just got stable or something like that. Once it is in a full stable release then I -think- it should show up in Chrome in roughly 3 months. So, let’s say by mid-year 2017 just to be safe. So, note to self to re-check that issue in mid-2017 (and just to be clear, this is not the issue you’re currently seeing, though once you fix the form then you might encounter it or might not…)

Back on #1 in your last update, what exactly do you mean when you say you looked at “the plugin’s debug log file”? Which plugin are you talking about and what log file?

Note that for EBD to work properly you must have WP_DEBUG turned OFF