Automator 2.8: Six new integrations!

We had to one-up the 5 integrations that were included in the 2.7 release a few weeks ago, so today’s 2.8 release adds support for 6 new plugins and platforms. These are all in the free version of Uncanny Automator, so yes, the upcoming Pro 2.8 release will take these new integrations even further with additional triggers and actions.

Let’s jump right in to what’s new. We added some really powerful new features too, not related to integrations, so make sure you read to the end to find out about those!

BuddyBoss

Yes, we know our BuddyPress support was causing a lot of confusion. What’s supported in BuddyBoss and what’s not? How are they different? We’ve separated all supported triggers and actions into a new BuddyBoss integration, and in the 2.8 release we’re adding these new (and ported from BuddyPress) triggers:

• A user updates their profile
• A user updates their avatar
• A user replies to a topic in a forum
• A user accepts a friendship request
• A user sends a friendship request
• A user gains a new follower
• A user sends an email invitation
• A user posts activity to their stream

There’s one new action for BuddyBoss too: Add the user to a group. This one was a popular request and we’re excited that we were able to include this in the free version.

And, since we were already adding some of those things for BuddyBoss, these new triggers were added to our BuddyPress integration too:

• A user activates their account
• A user updates their profile
• A user updates their avatar
• A user accepts a friend request
• A user sends a friendship request

These new triggers add a lot of new opportunities for BuddyBoss (and BuddyPress) sites. But there’s still a ton of BuddyBoss functionality in the pipeline, including a lot more coming in next week’s Automator Pro release!

MailPoet 3

During our recent collaboration with Adam at WP Crafter, MailPoet 3 was definitely the #1 requested new integration. We built it as quickly as we could and the first actions are now available:

• Add the user to a list
• Add a subscriber to a list

The actions are pretty self-explanatory, but it means it’s now easy to do things like adding users to a list automatically after things like completing a course, earning a badge, attending a live event, etc. We’re confident this new integration will make a lot of our new Pro users happy.

Elementor

This was our #3 request in the last month, Elementor Forms were just behind MailPoet and BuddyBoss. For now this integration is simple and adds a single trigger for logged in users: A user submits a form. Count on anonymous form submission and other triggers in the upcoming Pro 2.8 release.

Integromat

The free release of Automator adds a “Send webhook” action to Integromat. This is just like our Zapier integration and similar to the webhook support in core. We’ll get a Knowledge Base article up soon to fully document how everything works on the Integromat side.

Events Manager

We didn’t want to limit our event management support to a single plugin, so today we’re expanding support to include the Events Manager. It’s a popular free plugin with over 100,000 installs, and Automator 2.8 adds this trigger:

• A user registers for an event

Much like our Events Calendar integration, this means that on event registration you can add users to a course, a BuddyBoss group, a membership level, even invite them to a Zoom webinar. It’s a pretty useful integration.

HappyForms

Due in no small part to the current Appsumo lifetime deal, we’ve had a lot of requests to add HappyForms to the list of support form plugins. Users of HappyForms, you can now trigger recipes when users submit a form. And, of course, additional triggers are coming soon in Pro.

WordPress and Automator Core

We get the most requests (by far!) for new integrations, but we always get the most excited when we can add new features that open up completely new opportunities and ideas in Automator. Today’s release includes several of those that, for many sites, could be completely game-changing.

This may have slipped under the radar for some people, but in Automator 2.7 we added a really interesting trigger: An Automator recipe completes with errors. This trigger made it a lot easier for site admins to be notified immediately if there was a problem with one of their recipes so they could take action before many users were affected. In today’s 2.8 release, we added a similar new trigger: A user completes a recipe. For monitoring recipe activity this can be a useful way to stay in the loop, but it also opens up possibilities like these:

• Only run some actions when a user has completed several recipes.
• Run a single recipe multiple times but only trigger certain actions once. In other words, maybe you want some things to happen every time a user buys a product or completes a course, but you only want to notify an admin or trigger a webhook the very first time someone does it. With regular recipes, you can’t do that; all actions run each time the triggers are satisfied. With this new trigger, however, you can have it fire a secondary recipe, but only once.

The next change is one we’ve been working on for months: Accept a post ID as a token in actions. It’s not a trigger or an action, but what it does is allow you to target specific posts in actions. This one is a bit confusing, but here’s what it means: you can use a single recipe to do different things depending on the context. Here are some examples of where this is useful:

• When a user completes any course, remove them from that course. Instead of needing a recipe for every single course, you now just need 1 recipe, because for the reveal action we can now pass in the course ID from the trigger itself.
• When an HR system sends a webhook to add users to live events, use the post IDs sent by the HR system to add the user to the event with that ID. That means you can have a single recipe and single webhook trigger that can add users to different events depending on what the HR system passes.

The big benefit here is that it will slash the number of recipes most sites need and eliminates the need to add new recipes manually each time you add a new lesson, product, event, or something else that would have needed a unique recipe.

To use this feature, look for the new “Use a custom value” when selecting a post in recipe actions. Choosing that exposes a field that allows you to enter or select a token; in most cases you should drill down into tokens from the triggers to find some type of post ID.

Finally, there’s a new WordPress core trigger: A user creates a post. This is another trigger that might be confusing at a glance but can be very powerful in the right context. Essentially it allows recipes to be triggered when any post type (including custom ones) are created. Not only that, the triggers can be specific to certain post types and associated taxonomies (e.g. category, tag, format). In other words, maybe a recipe is only fired when any post is created in the “Marketing” category.

That wraps up this release. It’s another huge one and everything covered above is in the free release. We hope you like the additions!