November 6th, 2009

We continue our Best-Of Series today with download managers. Or, plugins for WordPress that will allow you to provide various files to your website visitors for download. Over the years I’ve gone through many. Everyone will have a different preference but, here is a list of my top plugins for managing downloads with WordPress…

Drain Hole
I’ve been using Drain Hole on my personal site to serve up my files for a couple years now. So far it is the best download manager plugin I’ve been able to find. It does everything it advertises and does it well. I’ve not yet had any issues with this plugin. I highly recommend it!
WP-DownloadManager
Before I found Drain Hole I used WP-DownloadManager exclusively. It did what I wanted and didn’t seem to have many problems. It has the features most would expect in such a plugin. It also has some you might not. Such things as custom templates, categories, RSS feeds, and more.
WP-Filebase
I actually just recently learned of WP-Filebase. I can’t speak from personal experience but from the research I’ve done on it I think it would be one of the best options. It has the obvious features you expect from a download manager. Some of the highlights are quick tags, top downloads widget, extensive file details, and even download pausing.
Wordpress Download Monitor
I really like the interface of Wordpress Download Monitor. It’s simple yet complete. It does its job as a download manager and keeps it simple at the same time. Some of the attraction points of this plugin are: simple custom download URLs, custom error pages, download mirrors, and even custom fields for all files.
Simple Download Monitor
What’s great about Simple Download Monitor is right in its name. It’s simple! To quote the author of the plugin “…I wanted to monitor the number of downloads of my files without having to maintain any kind of database or making any special download links. I just wanted to upload a file to a designated directory using FTP, provide a direct link to it and once in a while check the number of downloads“. This plugin also allows advanced logging.

What I think is especially nice is that all these plugins seem to be compatible with the upcoming WordPress 2.9. That means that they are future-proof for at least the foreseeable future. I took time to test each one of these plugins during the writing of this post. But, feel free to let me know if you have experienced anything to the contrary with any of them.

Well, that’s all for now. I hope you enjoyed the post and I hope you might be able to get something useful out of this list.

Do you have a good idea for the next article in the Best-Of series? Drop a comment here or contact us and your idea just might be next in the series!

(2 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)

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Tags: best of, download, manager, monitor, plugins
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Jeremy (1 comments.) says:

11/6/2009 at 10:56 am

Do you know if any/all of these will work with PodPress or the Podcasting plugin? I tried one a while back (I don’t remember which), and by using the trackable url for the media file, it broke the PodPress function, so I was unable to use it.

Thanks!

James Dimick (23 comments.) says:

11/6/2009 at 10:07 pm

I can’t say from personal experience but you could always give these download managers a try. May have changed since since you last tried.

Rajesh Kanuri (3 comments.) says:

11/6/2009 at 11:01 am

nice collection..

Lester Chan (25 comments.) says:

11/6/2009 at 11:34 am

Thanks for featuring my WP-DownloadManager, I will be testing against WP2.9 when the beta is out =)

James Dimick (23 comments.) says:

11/6/2009 at 10:14 pm

It’s a great plugin. Thanks for creating it!

Kenji (4 comments.) says:

11/6/2009 at 1:16 pm

Where can we see Drain Hole in action?

James Dimick (23 comments.) says:

11/6/2009 at 10:13 pm

Well, I’m not aware of any official places to demo the plugin but, you can get an idea of how the front-end looks if you look at my use of it here and here. As I mentioned in the post, I currently use Drain Hole on my site. Not sure if that helps but I’m not aware of any way to demo the plugin without installing it.

Flick (12 comments.) says:

11/7/2009 at 4:00 pm

I’ve used Wordpress Download Monitor for 2-3 sites and can really recommend it. It was a big surprise when I found out that the newest version supports members-only downloads. Previous I’d have had to hide the URL so a big bonus imho.