With selling some themes, scripts and plugins not to make a life, but to get in a bit of the domain and webspace costs of fansites and collectives, the fansites world was shocked, when sellfy introduced their new 15$ the month professional plan with the addition

P.S. Professional plan will apply to all new users right away. You will be able to enjoy the old pricing until the end of the year – Dec 31st, 2016 or upgrade at any time.

With 15$ being not even the revenue of a whole year this is of course insane and eliminates hobby theme/script coders from further participation there.

Which is the reason why I decided to switch to Easy Digital Downloads before the year ends and share with you how to do this. Till now, I used a combination of the Download Monitor plugin and Sellfy download button includes, included into my current theme.

First step was to go to Plugins -> Add New and search for Easy Digital Downloads, install and activate it. If you offer free scripts like I do, too, you could also scroll a bit down and add the plugin Easy Digital Downloads Free Link, too, so that visitors are not shocked by the “Purchase” button (Attention: The free download button’s download links will show a 403 permission denied error, because the EDD folder is protected. You have to upload the item through the Media Library first and then chose that – already existing – download. I rather have an overview who downloaded my scripts, so I removed the Free Downloads plugin)

Activate Easy Digital Downloads

Now you have a nice “Downloads” Section in your WordPress Admin Sidebar. Let’s go to the settings first.

First of all, you have to set your downloads pages, like the checkout page. For pages (Checkout and its subpages,  Purchase History and Transaction Failed) should have been created automatically, but you might want to have them at another place. In the Pages overview, you can edit them to have another parent or another name. You have to add the country you’re from as base country. You can also set the Login Redirect page. In my case, this is the Downloads overview called “code”.

Pages settings

Payment Settings

Do not forget to save the settings before going to the next tab or the changes will be gone.

Next sub-tab, you can set your currency. In my case, it is Euro, not dollar. I ignored the API settings.

Next tab is important, the Payment Gateway. If you just want to accept Paypal, like me, check Paypal Standard from the checkboxes and the dropdown. In the next sub-tab, just enter your Paypal email and leave the other (API) fields free. You will need them only for sending refunds through WordPress, but you can do that through Paypal if it ever happens.

You can also go through the “Misc” settings and customize it to your personal needs (like if users have to create an account to download). Under the “Extensions” tab, you can add the text for your free downloads links buttons if you have that plugin installed, too.

Now I think it is time to add some downloads.

We can go to Downloads -> Categories and set up some of them, like php scripts, WordPress plugins, WordPress themes.

Then, go on to “Add new download”. Add your title, a description and the category.

New download description

Now you can go to the pricing options. For Affiliationally (php script) there is a free version and the brand free paid version. See the attachments how I’ve done it!

Price Settings

So I installed the plugin WP Menu Cart.

There is not as many options in the free version, but you can change the look easily through the style.css in your theme folder.

WP Menu Cart Settings

In my case, I had to use this css code to make it appear nice. You can overwrite the dash before the amount with adding !important to the code.

 .amount {display:block;width:100%;
font-family: ‘Alegreya Sans’, sans-serif;
font-size:0.5em;
color: #4A4139;
clear:both;}
.cartcontents {display:block;}
.amount::before {content:’download cart ‘ !important;}
.nav li a:hover {color: #FBF4EB;}
li#wpmenucartli {line-height:15px;}

Makes it look like this:

Now I was still missing an option to see the purchase history. This means, that you have to be able to log in somewhere. I didn’t want a login box to appear everywhere on the site, because it is not just a shop, but also a personal website and a fanlisting collective. Another problem is that my theme does not have a sidebar at all.

So I thought, somewhere on the code page, where you actually find the downloads, might be a nice place.

For this, I installed one more plugin: Easy Digital Downloads – Additional Shortcodes

This allows some additional shortcodes like:

[edd_user_has_purchases]Content Here[/edd_user_has_purchases]
[edd_is_user_logged_out]Content Here[/edd_is_user_logged_out]

Here I added this content:

[edd_user_has_purchases]
Here you can see the downloads you already purchased and re-downlaod them. 
Download History
[download_history]
Purchase History
 [purchase_history]
[/edd_user_has_purchases]
[edd_is_user_logged_out]Please log in to view your purchase history and re-download them.
[edd_login redirect="/code/checkout/purchase-history/"][/edd_is_user_logged_out]

Which means, if the user is logged out, it shows a login form, if the user is logged in and has purchases, the download and purchase history is shown.