Easy Protected Links Plugin

 

How many times have you found your hard work freely available all over the Internet in the form of downloadable pdfs, mp3s, videos, and more? If you've been creating products for any length of time at all, chances are it's happened more than once. 

 

Sure, you can install a shopping cart or membership plugin to control downloads, but the cost and maintenance is a headache, and for low cost products it may not be worth it.

 

Of course, if it were as easy as all that, you could stop reading right here. But while it's a simple (and inexpensive) thing to get an S3 account and upload your files, most people stop there and simply set their S3 buckets to "public" which allows everyone to download the files as long as they have a link. 

 

All you have to do is write about 50 lines of php code and add it to your WordPress theme files. Yeah. I didn't want to do that either, so I found a better solution...