Automator Pro 2.6: Faster and 10+ New Features

The Automator Pro 2.6 release was a long time in the making, and it’s a big enough release that we once again recommend you do some testing on a Staging site before applying it to your live environment. There are tons of changes, especially behind the scenes; we rebuilt some of the engine with performance in mind to slash load times on really large sites.

Here are the highlights of the 2.6 release:

New triggers

1. Automator Core: A user clicks a magic link. We have the magic button, now there’s a magic link too! It works the same way: run actions on users when they simply click a link.  Enroll them in or unenroll them from courses, webinars, groups, send them an email, or anything else you can imagine.
2. LearnDash: A user is unenrolled from a course. Want to follow-up with users that are removed from courses? Maybe losing access to one course means that users should be removed from groups and upcoming events? This new trigger can help.
3. WP Foro: A user replies to a topic. This new forum integration allows forum activity to trigger recipes. Give them an award or mark a learning activity complete when a user replies to a specific topic.
4. Upsell Plugin: A user subscribes to a product. Subscription purchases can now trigger things like group access, event registration, record transfer to other platforms and more.

New actions

1. WordPress: Update a user. This is the new action to get excited about. We have forms that create users and support free plugins, but what about forms to update user details in a really easy way? That’s what the new action is for in the screenshot above. What’s interesting is that all fields are optional and you can update custom usermeta values too. Just want a form to update someone’s last name? No problem. And don’t let the “Role” selection scare you; “No change” is available as an option and it’s what most recipes should use.
2. MyCred: Reduce the user’s rank for a specific set of points. It does what it says; when users earn a specific number of points, the rank is reduced.
3. MyCred: Increase the user’s rank for a specific set of points. The opposite of #5. 🙂
4. MyCred: Revoke a number of a specific type of points from the user. There’s a lot of MyCred in this release. This one revokes points from a user.
5. MyCred: Revoke all of a specific type of points from the user. This one is pretty harsh; all points are removed from a user for a specific type of points.
6. MyCred: Revoke a badge from the user. Penalize users by taking away their hard-earned badges with this malicious new action.

New token: Automatic login link

This new feature is pretty interesting.

Ever wish you could send users a link that they could use automatically log into a site?  This new token (that will mostly commonly be used in emails) generates a link that, when clicked, will log the associated user into the site. The link is valid for 7 days or logging the user in once, whichever comes first.

It’s a very powerful feature, but use it very sparingly and consider the possible implications. Recipes with this token are not recommended for admin users or other roles with elevated privileges.

Other updates

The performance changes under the hood are a culmination of several weeks of development and dozens of test cases across all of our integrations. It’s a big change, so that’s the reason we recommend testing this one on staging sites too.

Automator Pro 2.6.0 also changed the name of the “Uncanny Automator” integration type to “Automator Core”, added all registered post types for the “post is updated trigger” and includes a few other back end fixes.