dtynan

There is no built-in way to do that, but it can be done using CSS. I don’t really know the CSS that would accomplish that, but if you know CSS or know someone who does then you just need to examine the HTML source of the page after the download link appears and then figure out what CSS to use to do it.

The plugin authors, M&S Consulting, have some examples on their website and it looks like they’ve got some CSS that they give you that appears to display a download icon from what I can tell. However, all of their examples give an error when you press the Submit button, so you can never get the download link to appear (and thus can never see what the CSS would do as far as displaying a download icon). But, it might work for you as-is. You could just grab that CSS and put it in a stylesheet and see what happens .. might work, might not. This is the page I’m talking about:
http://www.mandsconsulting.com/vendor-solutions/products/wp-email-before-download

I just reread your description and realized that you said that the PDF display in Chrome. I thought you had said it doesn’t display properly in Chrome (like it displays once then never again, or it seems to get stuck and just shows the first page of the PDF or a gray screen or whatever). If you’re not seeing those problems, then you’re not encountering the Chrome PDF display bug I was describing.

Instead, it just sounds like you have Chrome which will display PDFs using its built-in viewer unless the website tells it to pop up a download window instead. Then, it sounds like maybe you have another browser like Firefox and it is not set up with a PDF plugin or not set up with one that is configured to display the PDF inside the browser. Thus, when you check or uncheck hide/mask in one case both of your browsers will pop up the download window and in the other case Chrome will display the PDF in the browser and your other browser (firefox or whatever) maybe pops up a download window because it doesn’t have a plugin configured to display the PDF internally.

So if that’s right then that’s working as it should — you probably just have one browser that isn’t configured to display PDFs. On the other hand, if Chrome is actually having trouble displaying the PDF properly (as I originally thought you had said), then ignore all this new comment as I’m off on an incorrect tangent.

EBD is supposed to send 2 emails out if you select ’email’ or ‘both’ in the EBD settings. I suspect you are only getting one of the emails maybe. Read my response in this item so you understand how EBD works as far as the emails go and what’s in them so you can make sure you are looking at the correct email and not getting confused by the notification email:

https://wordpress.org/support/topic/change-who-the-email-is-sent-from/

If that doesn’t help or seems unrelated to your problem then please post in here the shortcode you are using and, if possible, a link to your page so I can try it. And the version numbers of the 3 plugins.

• This reply was modified 9 years, 8 months ago by dtynan.

Yes, that is a common problem you’re running across…

EBD always sends 1 email which I call the “notification email” which typically goes to you (the wordpress admin) and it tells you that a user has filled in the form and downloaded the file or whatever. The configuration details for that email are available in the CF7 form that you created (under the ‘Email’ tab I believe). CF7 actually sends this email out. Normally, people just leave the To: as going to the WP admin and the From: as whatever it defaults to and that works just fine usually. People rarely have trouble with that email. To be clear, that email has no link to download anything, it’s just notifying you that some visitor filled in the form..

If you have configured EBD to ’email’ or to ‘both’ (rather than ‘inline’) then EBD itself will send an email to whatever email address the website visitor typed into the form. That email often doesn’t make it to the Inbox for that visitor, in fact it often doesn’t even get into the Spam folder. The reason for that is that the From: of the email gets set to some default value related to the actual computer that sent it … when you are on shared hosting that value will be unrelated to your website domain name and it will look like spam to the email provider & they’ll usually just not deliver it at all. To fix that, you need to set a From: value that uses your domain name and is actually a real email address that can actually get mail (you probably already have one set up or you can make one via the menus for your hosting provider). Typically, setting the From: is good enough to get the default email delivered to pretty much all mail providers. However, if someone has turned up their anti-spam settings it could end up in their spam folder, but generally just getting the From: good is good enough (you could also set up SPF and DKIM for your domain, which will help a little).

So, that’s a really long explanation to just get to the point where you need to either install Postman SMTP plugin or the Custom Sender For EBD plugin. Postman SMTP is the better, more robust solution that adds additional info like good logging and such, but you can use Custom Sender for EBD if you prefer that (that one just gives you a couple of fields to set the From: value or something like that).

On the downloading of a pdf issue, it sounds like you are at least partly running into a bug that exists somewhere between EBD and Chrome’s internal PDF viewer. Depending on the setup, EBD may have trouble delivering a PDF to Chrome if Chrome tries to display it using its internal PDF viewer. At this time, no one really knows where the bug is or exactly what it happens sometimes and not other times (seems to be related to how Chrome requests parts of files [byte ranges]). Anyway, the only way to workaround that issue is to make the browser pop up the file download window rather than trying to display the PDF in the browser. It sounds like maybe that’s what you want to do anyway, so that would be good…

I’m not sure why you’re seeing missing file extensions and so forth … not sure if you were Chrome or something else. Anyway, what you should do is go to the EBD settings page in WordPress and change the “Hide / Mask” setting (if it’s checked, uncheck it … if it’s not checked, then check it). That should, hopefully, cause all browsers to get the file download popup rather than trying to display the PDF inside the browser.

If it doesn’t work or you have other issues, please post a URL so I can see what’s happening (and also tell me whether you have Hide/Mask checked or not and what shortcode you’re using)

herandesign, I assume you have set it to ‘both’ in the EBD settings so that it should display a link on the page as well as send an email. (If you haven’t done that, then do that).

Regardless of that, you have a problem on your page that is related to ajax. If you look closely when you press the Submit button on your form, you’ll notice that the entire page clears and redraws in the browser —- as if you had navigated to a new page. It should not do that. That behavior is a normal POST from a form submit. It should be doing an Ajax POST, which happens without the page clearing.

I don’t know if you’re familiar with browser development/debug tools like the built-in Firebug tools in Firefox or the Developer Tools in Chrome, but if you are then you can open those up on your page and put them on the Network tab and check the setting to not clear the log (the “Preserve Log” checkbox in Chrome), then fill in your form and hit submit. You’ll see that none of the transactions say “xhr” as the type (in other words, not Ajax). If you were to try a properly working EBD set up then you would see that when you hit submit only a couple of transactions happen (rather than the like 30 or 40 that happens on your site because the entire page is reloading) and that the type is “xhr”.

So, basically, you have something interfering with ajax. Usually that is a plugin or javascript library of some type. Typically related to navigation or ajax or forms or something like that. I suggest you disable as many as you can and try again and see if things work better. If it’s not a plugin it can also be a really weird theme, but I don’t think that’s the case. (technically this is all Contact Form 7 at this point .. CF7 is supposed to submit the form and get the response via ajax, so I’m not really the expert but what I’ve told you should be correct)

To get just the form to disappear after pressing Submit put this css in some css file somewhere that gets pulled in for that page:

.wpcf7-form.sent
{
    display:none;
}

As for the 2 emails, that is normal behavior. One email is sent by email-before-download.php and that is the one that goes to the email address that the website visitor types into the form displayed on your website. The other email is what I call the “notification email”. That one is sent by CF7 and the stuff that you configure on the Email tab of the CF7 screen in your wordpress admin controls that email. Thus, if you don’t want that email you can configure it to email to some account that you never check by putting an email address in the To: field (on that Email tab in your CF7 form in the configuration screens for it).