Automator Pro 4.5: New Condition features plus JetEngine

Uncanny Automator Pro 4.5 is our last big release of the quarter—but don’t despair, because the first Q4 release is coming in the next few weeks and it’s going to be huge!

Today’s update adds new JetEngine support, but it’s what we’re introducing to conditions that will be a game-changer for many sites. Not only is it easier to create complex recipes, but you can create otherwise impossible use cases related to date and time conditions.

Multiple actions per condition

We know, it’s cumbersome to set up recipes when several actions share the same conditions. A few versions ago we introduced drag & drop support for actions, but it took us some time to get the user interface and functionality just right to introduce support for multiple actions sharing one set of conditions. Starting today, you can drag actions around, including into condition “groups”, so for each set of conditions you can now include multiple actions. Here’s what it looks like:

Yes, the preview animation is really cool; our front end team put a lot of work in here. If you didn’t catch it, watch how the actions collapse when things are moved around so you see a simplified view. By showing only the minimum required information, it’s easier to move actions to the right location and see multiple actions onscreen at once. Of course, it’s not just about looking great. The new feature itself makes it a lot more efficient to keep conditions organized in a recipe and slash the time it takes to create recipes. Moreover, it does actually work—when the conditions are met, all actions under the conditions will fire.

New Conditions: Date & Time

Uncanny Automator Pro 4.5 introduces a completely new class of conditions called “Date and Time”. This represents a huge change in how recipes can be run because instead of making conditions about data, we can make actions only run at certain times, dates, days of the week and more.

Let’s start off with a simple example. Perhaps you want to run a sale that includes access to a bonus course, but the bonus is only valid for purchases made in September. Until today, there was no easy way to handle it automatically in a recipe except to actually go in and disable the recipe. Well, now you can just add this to the recipe instead:

Pretty cool, right? Of course, running actions during a certain month (or not during that month) only is pretty limited, so we built all of these conditions that you can attach to your actions:

• The date is a specific date
• The date is a specific day of the month
• The date is a specific month
• The date is between a specific date and a specific date
• The day is a specific day of the week (run your actions on Fridays only or every day except Sundays!)
• The time is before or after a specific time
• The time is between a specific time and a specific time

We think that’s a pretty strong start to the new condition type, and as we get more feedback, we’ll be adding even more.

As you can see from the screenshot above, the date or time can be populated from the current WordPress date and time, a token passing in a date or time, or even something hard coded. We spent a ton of time building (and dozens of hours testing!) a variety of date and time formats including text, tokens, Unix timestamps and more to make sure the conditions work well across a lot of sites and date formats.

JetEngine & JetFormBuilder

In the free version of Uncanny Automator 4.5 we released our first Crocoblock integration, and in Automator Pro we’re adding support for a second: JetEngine. There are 2 new triggers:

• A user updates a specific JetEngine field on a specific post type
• A user updates a specific JetEngine field on a specific post type to a specific value

So, by popular request, you can now trigger a recipe based on JetEngine field changes for any post types you might be using. This works exactly as you would expect, and as similar features for WordPress posts, Advanced Custom Field, Meta Box and others have worked for some time.

While adding those new triggers, we also bundled in 2 more triggers for JetFormBuilder:

• A form is submitted with a specific value in a specific field
• A user submits a form with a specific value in a specific field

And the rest

AffiliateWP gains a new action to create a new affiliate. This is a big addition and allows scenarios like creating a new affiliate when a tag is added to a user, a form is submitted, users complete an onboarding course, etc.

Following up on the Automator 4.5 release, SureCart also gets a “guest purchases a product” trigger for Pro users. And for the new Advanced Ads integration, there’s a trigger for “An ad’s status changes from a specific status to a specific status”.

There are 2 new WordPress Core triggers, both of which are really important additions:

• A user is deleted
• A specific meta value of a specific type of post is updated to a specific value

With the former, now you can get notifications when accounts are deleted or you can use the WordPress account deletion to fire deletions in related apps and sites so you can stay compliant with GDPR and privacy requirements.

For our membership plugins, MemberPress adds a new trigger for “a user’s transaction for a membership is set to a status” and Paid Memberships Pro gets “an admin assigns a membership level to a user”.

Finally, if you’re still not excited about the condition announcements and were hoping for some extra conditions for extra plugins, you’re in luck. There’s a new Automator condition to check whether or not a user has completed another recipe, MemberPress adds “the user is not an active member of a membership” and WooCommerce gets “A user has not purchased a specific product”.

For the complete list of updates, don’t forget to check out the changelog.