Thread

I am running a site on EE 1.6.9 Build:  20100430 (http://www.tupssofoa.org/).

We have encountered an issue where the “Resources” section of our site should only be visible to members. This is true of the actual pages, but it is possible for users to share direct links to files (PDFs, etc.) that they find on these pages.

In order to alleviate this, I have been researching modules and plugins that attempt to either obscure the download links or make file downloads available to members only.

However, each of my attempts with these add-ons has failed. So far I have tried Downloader, LinkLocker Pro, and Download Lock.

The download links created by LinkLocker were all expiring and not regenerating. Also, when I tried to use LinkLocker to limit the downloads to members only, it kept telling me I was not a member and therefore couldn’t download the file. I even created a second account for myself where I assigned myself Member permissions instead of Superadmin permissions. No luck.

I tried another module called Download Lock in combination with a File extension for EE that seemed to promise good results, but it was throwing some errors too and the developer of the module hasn’t done any work on it in over a year. The Download Lock module is adding a “.html” to the end of every file, causing it to not work.

Currently I am trying the Downloader plugin and getting a “No direct script access allowed” error: http://tupssofoa.org/index.php?/member_downloads/

I have tried scouring the old forums but nothing I try seems to help. Many of the instructions are nearly 2 years old now. Does anyone have clear, up-to-date instructions for implementing such functionality within an EE site?  It doesn’t matter to me which add-on we use, as long as I am able to implement it and it works as promised.

I can remember Mark Bowen using linklok http://www.vibralogix.com/linklokurl/ to achieve what you’re describing. I’ve included the PDF below. Hope this helps, as I haven tried it out myself.

And if you’re not opposed to an external solution, have a look at
http://pulleyapp.com/

Thanks for the suggestions! I am currently investigating Linklok URL (v2.4) and I have a copy of the script uploaded to my server, but now I’m not really sure how to include or implement the script within my EE templates.

I took a look at Mark’s PDF, which was very helpful for understanding the big picture of how Linklok URL will work when combined with EE, but there are no implementation instructions specific enough for me to follow. Has anyone else written a tutorial or help documentation about this? It really seems like it should be easier to specify that file downloads should only be accessible to logged-in members of the site.