This post explains how you can give your members access to the Product Downloads when using the WP eMember plugin.

A “Members’s Only” download page is simply another page that contains a whole bunch of download links that the members can use to download the products. So all you have to do is create a page (eg. “Member’s only download”) and put links to all the downloadable files on this page and then protect this page from the “Manage Content Protection” menu of the WP eMember plugin. Since the page is protected, only the members with correct membership level can access this page and download the file.

If you want to give access to a different set of downloadble files to your members based on their membership level (eg. silver, gold, platinum) then you can create few different “Member’s only download” pages (one for each membership level) listing different downloadble files and protecting the pages accordingly.

View the Member’s Only Download Page on the demo site to see how this is done. Log in using the following details:

Username: free123
Password: testpass

More Secure Download option when used with the WP eStore plugin

If you are using the WP eStore plugin then you can take this one step further. Instead of giving out the links to your products (eg. PDF file, Zip file, MP3 file) directly on the “Member’s Only Downlaod” page you can put a “Download” button that lets the user download a particular product. Whats the advantage? The member can download the product without knowing the actual location of the downloadable file (so the download location stay secret).

How to create a “Download” button using the eStore?

Configure the products in WP eStore then use the following shortcode for each downloadable product on the page:

[wp_eStore_download_now_button id=1]

1 is the Product ID of the product in this example.