dtynan

ugh, sounds like you’ve done a lot of the stuff I would have asked you to try. hmm. Yeah, [Moderated] and then update this ticket when you do (I don’t normally check that email address .. just a test email address for me, so I’ll need to know to go check it)

You can get part of the way there sort of — in the EBD settings you can put in your own text for the email that gets sent out and you could put a link in there that goes to some download page. However, there is no way to have it automatically create that download page nor put the links to the download files on that page.

I guess you could make that page yourself and just put links on there yourself, though you would then have a URL on your site that someone might share or post online or whatever that would let them get to your downloads … if you don’t care about that possibility then I guess that could work. You’d be sort of bypassing a lot of the functionality of the EBD and Download Monitor but no big deal if that would work for ya…

Are you using the Extra theme from Elegant Themes? Are you using the little modules (like the builder module thingies)?

I’m just guessing, but I suspect the problem might be related to that. The email-before-download shortcode gets executed (and the arguments to it get parsed & stored in variables). Then, the php code does a do_shortcode() call and calls the contact-form-7 shortcode. I’m guessing that the Extra theme is somehow interfering with that do_shortcode call in some way. Essentially, it’s a shortcode within a shortcode (sort of). Not too many plugins do that, so perhaps there’s a bug there that Elegant hasn’t caught. My guess is that this might be related to the quotes around the arguments. You might try changing the email-before-download shortcode to not have any quotes around the arguments. If that doesn’t work, maybe try changing them to single quotes.

Anyway, that’s my best guess. The other possibility is that somehow things have gotten screwed up in the database somehow. You could check that by making a completely new form in contact form 7, make a completely new page in wordpress, upload a new file into download monitor & give it a filename you have never used before, then make a new ebd shortcode from all that new stuff (you should have all new IDs at that point – new form id, new download id) and put that on the new page you made in wordpress and try it. If it’s a database issue then that will get around it.

The other thing you could try is to switch from Extra to some non-builder theme (switch to some simple theme). If you’ve been using the ET builder/module stuff then when you do that you’re going to see all of the ET shortcodes appear, which will look weird. …. just make a new test page and try it & see if it works (that way the EBD shortcode won’t reside inside ET shortcodes, which, as I said, may be interfering with the parsing or something like that)

From your description I was unable to tell if it sometimes doesn’t work with IE or it sometimes doesn’t work with Chrome or if it sometimes doesn’t work with both of them…?

I am not aware of any problems with IE displaying PDFs downloaded using EBD.

I am aware of a problem with some PDFs not downloading and displaying properly in Chrome. It only seems to be certain PDFs and/or certain sites (or certain webservers). The problem appears to be somewhat inconsistent to people because it does sometimes work — the reason why has to do with whether or not the browser has cached it. I’m guessing this is the problem you’re seeing, but maybe not… I’ll wait for you to clarify.

It sounds like you want to have the user download the file and also redirect the browser to a different page. EBD does not have that capability. You would have to write some custom javascript to do that … and I’m not sure how well it would work in various browsers. Might work fine & be consistent, but it might not.

If you search the web you’ll find various javascript suggestions for clicking on a link and both downloading a file and redirecting the browser, such as http://stackoverflow.com/questions/6894900/download-a-file-via-jquery-and-redirect

Of course, you’ll have to figure out how to target the link that EBD adds to the page (via ajax update). Or, modify the plugin php code and put the javascript in there in advance. Either way will take some trial and error I would guess. Plus, testing with various browsers. Plus, if your download file is PDF then that could make things more complicated as well.

Good luck…

I’m sorry, I don’t understand your question. Can you ask again and give more detail about what you mean?

ps – if you do get a 500 server error at some point, then look at your webserver log to find out what the error is.

just put [file_urls]

don’t put the a href stuff or the [file_name] thing