Downloadable Archives - Business Bloomer

WooCommerce and TranslatePress: Fixing Download URL Issues for Translated Sites

Handling download URL issues on a multilingual WooCommerce site using TranslatePress can be challenging. For store owners selling digital goods, encountering broken links or damaged downloads in secondary languages can disrupt customer experience.

A user in the Business Bloomer Club recently reported a problem where the default email for a completed order included a damaged PDF link in the translated Hungarian version of the site. The issue boiled down to the added language slug (/hu/) in the download URL.

This raises important questions: How can you resolve URL conflicts in TranslatePress to ensure proper file downloads? Are there alternative solutions or workarounds to prevent the addition of the language slug in specific scenarios?

Below, we explore potential fixes for this issue, including troubleshooting the plugin and implementing custom rules to maintain functional download links across languages.

WooCommerce: Hide Columns @ My Account Downloads Table

Want to customize the WooCommerce “Downloads” table on the My Account page? By default, WooCommerce displays multiple columns (“Product”, “Downloads remaining”, “Expires”, “Download”), but you may want to remove some for a cleaner look or to focus on essential information.

Whether you’re simplifying the layout or tailoring the table to your store’s needs, a simple PHP snippet can help you hide unwanted columns effortlessly.

For example, on Business Bloomer I definitely don’t need the “Downloads remaining” column and the “Expires” one, because all my downloadable products – WooCommerce Mini Plugins – come with unlimited downloads and they never expires!

In this post, I’ll show you how to remove specific columns using a WooCommerce filter. Just add the snippet to your theme’s functions.php file or in a custom plugin, and you’re good to go!

Protecting Downloadable PDF Files in WooCommerce for Logged-In Customers

In a recent Business Bloomer Club Slack thread, WooCommerce store owners discussed ways to secure downloadable PDFs stored in the Media Library, aiming to restrict access to logged-in users who purchased the files.

While some accepted the reality that determined users can often find ways around restrictions, several solutions offer improved security to protect digital downloads.

WooCommerce: Hide My Account “Downloads” Tab If User Has No Downloads

In WooCommerce, the “Downloads” tab of the My Account page is automatically visible to all users, even if they haven’t purchased any downloadable products. This can lead to a less-than-optimal user experience, as the tab might seem irrelevant or confusing to customers who don’t have any available downloads.

In this post, I’ll show you how to hide the “Downloads” tab for users who don’t have any downloadable products linked to their account.

With just a simple code snippet, you can make your WooCommerce store more streamlined and user-friendly by ensuring that only the customers who need to access the downloads section will see it in their account.

Whether you’re new to WooCommerce development or just looking for a way to tidy up the My Account page, this guide will walk you through everything you need. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Rename Downloads Table Column Title @ My Account

The WooCommerce My Account > Downloads endpoint features a table which lists the available downloads. This table has 4 default columns: Product, Downloads remaining, Expires, Download (as you can see from the screenshot below).

Now, it’s very likely you may want to rename these headings into something more readable or understandable. On top of that, you may want to change the content of whatever column – you’ll find a workaround for this as well. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Fix “Sorry, This File Type Is Not Permitted for Security Reasons” For Downloadable Products

In WordPress, you get the “Sorry, This File Type Is Not Permitted for Security Reasons” error when you try to upload certain files to the Media library. Similarly, in WooCommerce you may get the same error when you try to upload a downloadable product download files.

Why is that? Well, by default WordPress only allows certain file extensions to be uploaded to the site. For example PNG, JPG, PDF, PPT, DOC, MP3 and MP4 are within the allowed file types – the reason being they are “safe” and won’t contain malicious code that could create problems within a WordPress install.

The thing is – I’ve started selling my first downloadable product (a mini-plugin) here on Business Bloomer and I needed to upload a ZIP file (the mini-plugin), a JSON file (a Code Snippet export file for those who don’t like plugins) and a TXT file (the plugin’s raw code for those who like to play with PHP). All went smoothly for the ZIP upload, but as soon as I tried uploading the JSON and TXT files I got the “Sorry, This File Type Is Not Permitted for Security Reasons” error.

Panic? Not really. It’s only a matter of finding the right code to change this default WordPress behavior. So, say hello to the “upload_mimes” filter, which allows us to do just that. Enjoy!

WooCommerce: Add a Custom Download File @ My Account

If you sell no downloadable products, the Downloads section of the WooCommerce My Account page will always be empty (in this case, you should completely hide the My Account Download tab). Besides, if you do sell downloadable products but customers never purchased such items, the same will happen.

So, what if you wanted to grant at least a default download file to all your customers? Well, the “woocommerce_customer_get_downloadable_products” WooCommerce filter allows us to add files to the list (empty or non empty) of customer downloadable files. Here’s how it’s done!

WooCommerce: Get List of Downloadable Products (PHP)

When you’re doing custom PHP work, this snippet will come in handy. It’s a quick way to get a sub-list of product IDs based on product meta criteria – in this case we’ll get a list of products that have “_downloadable” set to “yes” (which, in plain English, means they are “downloadable“).

Of course, you can use wc_get_products to get any sub-list of product IDs, for example in stock products, products by custom field value, products by category, products by tax class, and so on. Enjoy!

Tag: Downloadable