Dean J Robinson - deanjrobinson.com

If you run a site like mine, where you provied files for download and you want to be able to accurately track the number of times a particular file is downloaded, then you will probably use some sort of download manager plugin. Note the keyword there is “accurately”…

Since around the middle of January I’ve been using the iMP Download plugin (I would provide a link but the site seems to be broken at the moment), and while it is compact and has all the features I want, its not particularly reliable as many of my visitors have experienced.

For starters there is something very wrong with the way it is counting downloads. I have almost reach 6000 downloads of Redoable 1.1, but if you look at the iMP download count it says 2,300-odd. This can be partially explained by the addtional download links I’ve provided and the various sites that are directly linking to the download. But even when the iMP Download links were the only ones around the count was still way off.

Another problem was that if a user clicked the iMP download link, and for some reason cancelled the download, or the download didn’t work, the next time they clicked on a download link it would just redirect them to the homepage. Very annoying, I tested this out myself as well.

To counteract the problem I put additional direct links to the download files, and thats been ok while I’ve been searching for another download manager.  After a bit of searching this afternoon I came across the Wordpress Download Monitor Plugin, it seems like a good alternative and I’ll bee testing it out over the coming week or so. If all goes well I will be removing support for iMP Download from Redoable and recommending this new plugin.

If you use a plugin other than these two that I have mentioned, and want to share your thoughts about what you like and dislike about download manager plugins and which one you think is best.