dtynan

Use the export CSV link from the top of the EBD Settings page rather than from Download Monitor.

Because of your shortcode you are actually only using Contact Form 7 — you are not actually using Email Before Download. I assume that was also the case when you were doing single-file download. An EBD shortcode looks something like
[email-download download_id=”372″ contact_form_id=”482″]
That download_id value is the ID value of the file you added to Download Monitor (the file that will be downloaded by the website visitor). The contact_form_id is the ID value of the form that you created in CF7.

It can be a little tricky to get things working correctly — that’s especially true if you’re doing ’email’ or ‘both’ (rather than ‘inline’) in the EBD settings. Getting email delivered often has problems.

I suggest you closely read the FAQ page (https://wordpress.org/plugins/email-before-download/faq/) and look very closely at the Screenshots (https://wordpress.org/plugins/email-before-download/screenshots/). Aside from using the wrong shortcode, what you added for multi-file download is incorrect. You did [ebd /], but those square brackets are supposed to be angle brackets <ebd />

Once you’re restudied that stuff, then get rid of the [ebd /] code in your form. Don’t put in the correct one yet though — you really want to get it working properly for single file before you try multi. So, next, fix your shortcode so that is the email-download style shortcode. Next, if you’re changed any of the defaults in the EBD settings page you might want to put them back. Also, I suspect perhaps you’ve hardcoded a link to the download file into the CF7 form ’email’ tab. If you have done that, that’s wrong, get rid of it. The email sent from CF7 is a notification email to you — it does not go to the guy who filled in the form when he visits your website.

So, do all that, then post back in here with a link to your page & also list the version numbers of the 3 plugins you installed (Download Monitor, Contact Form 7, and Email Before Download).

Problem 1:

Looks like maybe you’re not using the correct shortcode. Your shortcode needs to have a download_id=”5″ (replace 5 with whatever the id is of your download file in Download Monitor). I’m not sure if you’ve left that out of your shortcode or if maybe you’re using a CF7 shortcode rather than an EBD shortcode. Your shortcode needs to look something like:

[email-download download_id="425" contact_form_id="488"]

That downnload_id is associated with your download file in Download Monitor and the contact_form_id is associated with the form you made in Contact Form 7. See the screenshots page and the FAQ page for more info/examples. Once that is fixed, it will start logging properly into the CSV file.

Problem 2:

It looks like you have hardcoded a link to the download file in the email that gets sent out to the user. You don’t need to do that. Once you fix Problem 1 then EBD will be working correctly and the email that gets sent will automatically have a link to the download. Or, if you put your own text into the email template setting (I think it’s item 9.1 in the EBD settings), which it looks like you want to do, then rather than putting the URL of the pdf file in the a href link you have in there, you should put [file_url] instead (see the help text underneath item 9.1). Then when the email is sent out, [file_url] will be replaced with the URL to the download. That URL will be a link to the email-before-download/download.php program with a big long string of characters on the end. When people click that, the download.php will give them the download file associated with the download_id that you put in your shortcode. The reason for all of this is so that A) it gets logged and you can download it in the CSV file and B) the end user gets a link that is somewhat obscured, making it less likely that they’ll share it with other people (thus making it more likely that others will go through the signup form rather than just going directly to the link that someone told them about) and C) you have the option of expiring the download link after some set period of time.

Problem 3:

When I tested your page using one of my test gmail.com addresses, the email that came to me went into my spam folder. You probably need to change the From: of the email so that it is not the default. There is no way in EBD to change the From: (this is for the email sent by EBD, NOT the email sent by CF7 which you can change the From: on). So, in order to change the From:, you need to either install the plugin Custom Sender For Email Before Download, which will let you set the From: value. Or, what more people tend to do, is to install Postman SMTP, which will let you do that and gives you other goodies like a log of what happens when an email is sent (helpful if you think your email might not be going out).

gednav, please do not update old items — please pen a new item instead and put the problem you’re having into the new item

(wordpress.org has changed it so it sorts support items by the original date it was opened rather than the last update, so it’s very unlikely that I’ll see updates on old existing items).

Make sure you are using the download CSV link at the top of the EBD Settings page in your WordPress admin screens (not the one from the Download Monitor area of the admin screens).

Hi — as a new wordpress user I’m surprised you got as far as you did really. Lots of brand new folks download “Download Manager” by mistake rather than “Download Monitor” 🙂

I appreciate the fact that you looked back through old issues to try and fix this yourself. I’ll give you one of my patented long explanations as a thanks 🙂

So, the problem is very likely that you have warnings/errors going to the screen rather than to a file. In PHP-land, that stuff is controlled by settings in your php.ini file (and you can have multiple ones of those .. sometimes one for Apache and one for php from the command line, etc). It can get a little complicated. Anyway, in that file there are some settings that tell PHP whether or not to spit out warnings, errors, or only critical stuff and then also where to spit it .. out to the display (or whatever started the program) or to a file. So, you might have that stuff set to go to the display rather than to a file. But, that’s PHP-land.

In WordPress-land, I think that stuff is controlled by WordPress settings (though it might be controlled at both levels .. I’ve never really bothered to figure it out all the way). Anyway, in WordPress-land, turning on WP_DEBUG is how you normally debug stuff. USUALLY that is turned on or off in the index.php file in your wordpress directory. IF it’s ON then errors and/or warnings are going to go somewhere. I think they’ll end up going to the screen if php.ini says so … or, there is also a WordPress settings that controls that as well (called display_errors). See this post from someone that talks about this stuff better than I’m doing: https://aristath.github.io/blog/wp-hide-php-errors

The reason this is a problem is that EBD sends back an AJAX response when the website visitor hits the submit button. That response is JSON. If display errors is on, then there is a warning that happens then and that warning text gets mushed into the JSON and corrupts it and everything hangs. Turning off display of errors/warnings is the easiest way to fix it. A perhaps better way is to make all your errors/warnings go to a file somewhere by setting that stuff in php.ini. That’s what I do … that way I can still see that stuff, but I never accidentally poop out a bunch of errors to some website visitor who went to a wordpress page on my site that had a problem. But, either way, the main thing is to stop those messages, which should fix the issue that you’re seeing.

If it doesn’t fix it, post a URL so I can go try your site.

ps – The Description page for EBD states that you have to use that old version of Download Monitor and it gives you a link to it. That is not actually the case. You can use the latest version of Download Monitor. The advantage of using the latest DM is that EBD will generate far fewer warnings and errors (the older DM works .. you’ll just see scary-looking warnings & error msgs in the log [assuming you make that stuff go to a file]. You can ignore those errors/warnings .. they don’t really matter, but they are unsettling). If you have the old DM right now, you can just remove it and then install the latest one and then re-upload your file into it. Note that the new DM works/looks quite a bit different when you go to add/upload a file .. it looks like you’re making a post or page in wordpress .. takes a bit of getting used to .. see DM documentation if you get confused).

You should be getting 2 emails.

One email is what I call the notification email. That one goes to the To: address in the CF7 form that you made (usually that is set to your wordpress admin email address, unless you changed it). That one is just to tell you that a visitor came to the site, filled in the form, and was sent an email (or given a link on the page or whatever).

The other email is the one that goes to the email address that the website visitor typed into the form that was displayed to them on your page. This could be any email address. If things are working correctly, then it will send an email to that address and that email will have a link to the download or an attachment (or both). It is a common problem for this email to not arrive because it gets blocked by the email provider (like Yahoo Mail for example).

So, for you to test your setup, you need to make sure you are getting both emails. Thus, when you go to your page as if you were some random person on the internet, make sure you put in a test email address —- NOT the same one you are using as your wordpress admin email address. Then, submit, and see if you get an email to that address and another email to your wordpress admin email address (or whatever you set it to when you made the CF7 form).

Update this w/results of your test etc

The only way to do multiple files is to make it display checkboxes (one checkbox for each file). You designate which files by using multiple download_id values in your EBD shortcode. So your shortcode might have something like download_id=”122,153,86″ or something like that. That is how you specify which files from Download Monitor. In Download Monitor itself, you do not multiple URL in the download detail page like you are doing.

And you need to use either <ebd /> or <ebd_left /> in your CF7 form (note that there is space before the slash in those codes). ebd_left is for checkboxes to appear on the left side (which usually looks better). See the last screenshot on the screenshots page for an example if this is confusing.

In your case, because you are only emailing attachments, it might seem like you should be able to just do multiple files like you are trying to do, but you have to realize that in most configurations, EBD is displaying the Title of the file to the user as a link they can click on the page (‘inline’) or in the email (’email’). The only time that doesn’t happen if you do email with attachments and you change the text of the email to not have any links in it. Thus, EBD sort of wants a 1-to-1 relationship between things on the screen and things you download. That’s why to do multiple files you must do checkboxes. That will mean the user can see file titles for both of the files you want to send on the screen and then he can either check or uncheck the checkbox next to each one (which will then control which ones [or both] are attached to the email that is sent). You can default the checkboxes to checked, but he can still uncheck them if he wanted to.

That’s the only way to do it…I think .. (you could TRY not putting in the <ebd /> or <ebd_left /> codes and just putting two download id’s in the download_id=”” part of your shortcode and see if it works. I’m pretty sure it won’t, but I haven’t actually tried that, so as a quick test you could do that before you convert over to checkboxes … maybe it’ll magically attach both to the email [though I doubt it])