Note About Bucket, Folder, and File Names
Per Amazon’s documentation regarding S3 bucket and file names, we don’t recommend using dots/periods or spaces in either the bucket, folder, or file names. Instead, use underscores to prevent issues when using our shortcodes and accessing S3 files.
You can use links generated by [memb_s3_link] to provide secure download capability for your server. This helps protect your downloads against unauthorized downloading or deep linking. It cannot prevent your users from sharing your content, but it does make it more difficult.
Why Expiration Matters
Systems that provide secure S3 links are common, but most suffer from a major problem that limits how usable they are, or makes them unfriendly to your users. Amazon S3 expiring links work by limiting the amount of time that the link can be used from the moment that the page loads. If you set the expiration too low, then your users must act quickly to click the links before the timer runs out. If they click an expired link, it gives them an ugly, unhelpful error message.
Memberium solves this by generating the link when it’s clicked, meaning that your users can take their time reading your page content, and that they’ll never see an expired link error message.
If you set “direct_link” to yes, then this system is disabled, and the expiration timer will start from page load.
Buckets
Buckets are the way that Amazon S3 organizes it’s servers. The bucket name does not include the path. Buckets are used to store collections of objects. Objects behave much like files.
Objects and Filenames
Objects are how Amazon S3 stores your files. Unlike an FTP server, files on S3 do not have paths, however, you can put the “path name” into the file name so that it looks like a path. Many S3 softwares will use this to simulate paths. When you put your object name into the shortcode its important to include the full object name including the “path”.
When naming objects, it’s helpful to avoid certain characters that can cause problems when encoding the link. We recommend you stick to space, underline, dash, letters and numbers. Characters such as &, <, > and quotes are especially troublesome as they have special meaning in HTML.
Setting It Up
Go to Memberium > Remote Files to start configuring this.
- Links can be made to expire immediately after you click, completely eliminating the problem of the user sitting on the page and clicking after the link expires.
- Links can be made to require that the user clicking the link is either a logged-in admin or Infusionsoft user, So that even if someone shares the link before it expires, it won’t work unless the other person logs in.
- Links can be made so that when they’re clicked, they add/remove tags, run actionsets, and/or achieve goals: Know if they downloaded that PDF or not.
Note: When using this shortcode with the “Broken Link Checker” plugin, the link checker may corrupt your links and mark them as invalid.
Click here to read more about Remote Files.
We also have a detailed tutorial on how to protect downloads with Memberium and Amazon S3.
