Note: This addon requires an Uncanny Automator Business or Agency license.
Once you’ve defined your custom user fields, you’ll want to start storing user data in the fields. There are quite a few options for getting data into your new custom fields.
Updating custom user fields from the edit user page
Once you’ve defined a custom field, you’ll be able to set the value of that field from the default WordPress Edit User page in /wp-admin.
First, create your custom field(s):
Then navigate to the Edit User page of any user on your site. When you scroll to the bottom, you should see an area labeled Uncanny Automator Custom User Fields:
Enter or update the desired information, then click Update User at the bottom of the page.
Updating custom user fields using a recipe
With a recipe, you can easily set data in custom user fields. We’ll walk through an example of a recipe that populates data into a a custom user field when a user submits a form.
First, we’ll need a simple form:
Then we’ll build our recipe to run when a user submits the form:
- Trigger: A user submits a form
- Action: Set user meta
In this recipe, when a user fills out a form (this example uses a Formidable Form but you can use any supported form builder plugin like WP Forms, Contact Form 7, Gravity Forms, etc.) the value they entered in the Company name field of the form is assigned to the custom user field Company name. To do this in version 1.0 we’ll need to use the action Set user meta and enter the meta key of the custom field under Key. (In future releases you won’t need to enter the meta key, as we’ll have an action specifically for updating custom user fields.)
To find the meta key associated with the custom field, you’ll need to go back to Automator > Settings > Addons > Custom user fields and edit the desired field to view the meta key:
Once we’ve specified the correct meta key, under Value we’ll specify that user’s Company name by using the token for the value submitted by the user in the Company name field of the form we created.
Updating custom user fields on other customer activity
The above is a simple example of a form submission populating a custom user field, but with Automator’s wide range of available triggers and the ability to add multiple triggers to a recipe you could set the value of a custom field whenever a user performs any combination of supported actions, including:
- purchasing a product
- joining a group
- completing a course
- visiting a specific page
- any of hundreds of other supported triggers
This gives you the power to build very detailed customer profiles, which can then be used to personalize the user experience for customers or delivery highly targeted marketing.
