Automator 4.8: 20,000 Installs, Help Scout & WS Form LITE

Last week Uncanny Automator achieved a huge milestone: we crossed the 20,000 active install barrier. If you’re keeping track, this time 2 years ago we had just crossed 3,000 active installs. Our team is thrilled at the growth rate and response from our users, and we can’t wait to add even more features to help secure our place as a must-have WordPress plugin.

Speaking of more features, Uncanny Automator 4.8 is now available! This will be the last major release of 2022, so we’re making it count.

New feature: All vs. Any operators for triggers

Uncanny Automator has always supported an unlimited number of triggers for Logged In recipes. Since we launched Automator, recipes would always run when all triggers in the recipe were complete. In 4.8, now you have a choice: actions can run when all triggers are completed, or actions can run when any of the triggers are completed.

When you create or edit a recipe with more than 1 trigger using Automator 4.8, a selection will appear at the top of the trigger section:

If you want actions to run when all triggers are completed, leave the default “All” option selected. If only one of the triggers needs to be completed to run the actions, choose “Any”. It really is that simple. No more cloning recipes out to create variations with individual triggers.

When using recipes with an “Any” selection for the triggers, just be careful with your tokens. Keep in mind that if a trigger isn’t completed then its tokens won’t have values, so make sure to add extra tokens as needed. Consider your use cases carefully to avoid situations where expected data might be blank because that trigger wasn’t completed. It’s also a good idea to depend less on trigger-based tokens and more on user tokens if you can in recipes with “any” as the trigger selection.

New integration: WS Form LITE

With perhaps the most stellar review record on WordPress.org (not a single review less than 5 stars and over 100 reviews), WS Form Lite is a growing form plugin with a dedicated following. Joining our comprehensive list of integrations for WP form plugins, our WS Form Lite integration adds 2 new triggers in our free version:

• A form is submitted
• A user submits a form

As you might expect, the first option is for Everyone recipes, the second for Logged In.

So what can you do with this new integration that wouldn’t be possible otherwise? Well, you can:

• Send form entry data to Airtable for analysis
• Connect form submission to course and group enrollment, perhaps with LearnDash
• Link form submissions to live event registration, including with The Events Calendar and Zoom
• Use forms to broadcast messages to social feeds, Facebook and more.

New integration: Help Scout

We’ll be honest here; we created this integration as much for ourselves as we did for end users. If you have worked with the Uncanny support team, you probably know that we rely on Help Scout very heavily. We couldn’t offer the level of support that we do without it.

Unfortunately, its WordPress and Slack integrations simply couldn’t support what we wanted. We wanted Slack to notify a Slack channel when a specific tag was added to a conversation, not any tag. We also wanted to create conversations based on certain WordPress activities, like a payment failing. Then there were reviews; if we received a positive review for a ticket and feedback was provided, we wanted to have it automatically shared with our team in Slack. The marketplace didn’t have solutions here–so we built them ourselves. Our new integration offers a ton of new use cases that aren’t otherwise possible.

Here are the new triggers:

• A conversation receives a reply from a customer
• A conversation’s tags are updated
• A note is added to a conversation
• A satisfaction rating is received

And there are 2 new actions:

• Add a tag to a conversation
• Create a conversation in a mailbox

All of this support is in our free version, made possible with our credit system using our 1-click connections. To pass data from Help Scout to WordPress, a webhook needs to be set up on the Help Scout side; follow these simple instructions to get started.

Other new features

Our recent integration of WP All Import gains one new trigger: An import is completed. Run a lot of scheduled imports and want audit logs in Google Sheets or Slack notifications when imports are completed? No problem.

Need more tokens? Based on customer requests, we have added GiveWP tokens for Donation & Payment ID, Amelia gets 8 new tokens related to coupon data, and WooCommerce users get access to a Shipping method token.

That wraps up the Uncanny Automator 4.8 release!