Password Administrator+

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Password Administrator+ (PA+) is a commercial password management program. It can be purchased from http://www.illmatic.net/.

AShop Deluxe supports the sales of subscription access to password protected members only directories and provides a simple method to remove expired passwords from the list. When PA+ is installed on the same server as AShop and the path to PA+ is set within the third party software integration, each subscription can instead be managed after the initial order by using the more advanced features of PA+.

How AShop Deluxe Integrates To PA+
PA+ is written in Perl. It uses simple text files to store information about members. It uses standard web server access control to protect the directory/directories, but instead of .htpasswd files it writes to its own password files called d_pass.txt. Depending on which version of PA+ that you have, each protected directory may have a corresponding set of: d_active.txt, d_expired.txt, d_inactive.txt and d_pass.txt files stored in a subdirectory to the directory that the PA+ scripts are installed in or there may be only one set of corresponding .txt files in the directory that PA+ is installed within (not a subdirectory). The only thing AShop does differently with PA+ integration is to write to those .txt files instead of to a .htpasswd file.

Note: When we originally created integration to PA+, in version 4.6, separate sets of password files could be created in order to manage passwords on multiple directories separately. Somewhere between version 4.6 and 4.6.5, Illmatic removed this feature and changed PA+ to only administrate passwords in one directory. They now offer a more expensive application called PasswordRobot to manage more than one directory.

There is no drop down list on the add subscription page for PA+ integration. Just like with ordinary subscriptions you should enter the name of the protected directory in the box labeled: Protected directory. If a directory with this name exists within the path that is set for PA+ on the third party tools page, it will be used when a subscription is bought. If there is no such directory AShop will instead check for a standard .htpasswd file in $ashoppath/$protecteddirectory. PA+ subscriptions will always override ordinary subscriptions so you won't have to remove any old protected directories or .htpasswd files from your $ashoppath to make it work.

To use the PA+ integration

1.	Set up the protected directory in PA+

2.	Set the path to the cgi-bin directory (not the protected directory itself) where the PA+ scripts are stored as the $papluspath variable in the AShop Shop Parameters > Advanced Options

Example: /home/httpd/vhosts/yourdomain.com/cgi-bin/subdirectory or /home/httpd/vhosts/yourdomain.com/cgi-bin

4.	Add a subscription in the AShop catalogue and enter the name of the protected directory.