Math equations, Studiocart and Pabbly Connect

As Uncanny Automator approaches the 100 integration milestone, it’s still our endless list of features that elevates it above the competition (followed close behind by our best-in-class support and plugin reliability). In this release, we have 2 important new integrations: Studiocart and Pabbly Connect. Both have been popular requests from Automator users and the support we’re introducing in our free version today will open up a whole new suite of use cases. We’ll talk about those, but let’s start with the big new feature: support for performing math in your recipes.

Math equations

Uncanny Automator 4.2 introduces a new category of token called Data Modifiers. Picture a whole new suite of features that allow you to manipulate your data in various ways, and in today’s release, we’re starting with the most important one: Calculations.

Here’s what it looks like:

At a glance, it probably doesn’t seem that exciting. “Okay”, you might be thinking, “so Automator can add 6 to 7 and return 13, how does that help me?”

The power of calculations starts to appear when you work with other tokens and meta values.

With the very basics, you gain an easy counter system. Every time a recipe runs, look up an existing user meta value (maybe total courses completed or total purchases) and add 1 to it. Perhaps another recipe fires when a counter hits 10, or maybe use the values in some reporting tool.

There’s a simple counter example below. We could look up the existing meta value for the course_count key, add 1 to it, then store it again (or use the value elsewhere in the recipe).

Let’s take it one step further. Maybe every time a user’s subscription renews successfully, you add $10 in credit to whatever their current credit total is, or you add 10 points to a leaderboard for that user. Or maybe you sell timed access to a course or membership system. When the user buys 7 days of credit, tell Automator to look up their current expiration timestamp and add 7 days to it. Or when they buy a year, add a year to the current expiration date. Perhaps instead of purchases users can do things to earn more time or store credit, like commenting on posts, submitting forms, completing learning activities.

There are endless possibilities with this new math support. Use one or more tokens in a single equation. Use the 4 basic math operations, but if you want to go beyond that, you may just find that it works. (For any developers out there that want to go deep, we’re using the StringCalc 2 library and you can use any supported equation in our Formula field.)

At the more advanced level, one of our developers came up with an interesting use case, where you could use something like “max(3, 10)” in a gamification solution where Automator checks to see if a score that a user earns exceeds the previous highest (stored in post meta), and if it does, notify the admin or queue an action to award a prize to the winner at the end of the month (when the value gets reset).

Everything related to calculations is in our free version and you can find more details in the Knowledge Base. Now let’s move on to the new integrations.

Studiocart

We’re excited to announce a new integration for Studiocart, an optimized checkout system for WordPress that lets you build high-converting sales funnels quickly. After a flood of requests from their users over the past few months, we’re pleased to introduce 3 new triggers in our free version:

• A user completes an order for a product
• A user purchases a product
• A user’s order for a product is refunded

For Studiocart users, this opens up purchase and refund workflows to integrate with over 50 products that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, plus there’s everything our recipe builder supports to take automations to the next level. Connect Studiocart purchases to social groups, your favourite CRM, Zoom, Google Sheets, whatever you can think of. You could even start selling automatic posts on social media or a new event in Google Calendar.

Pabbly Connect

Similar to Zapier, Pabbly Connect is a popular SaaS integration tool that has over 850 integrations. Think of it as a non-WordPress version of Uncanny Automator. 🙂

Uncanny Automator 4.2 adds a single new action for Pabbly Connect:

• Send data to Pabbly Connect

And with that, of course, you can have any of your recipes send data to over 850 apps via Pabbly. Maybe you pass new account details from a form submission to an HR app, course completion records to an analytics tool, or event attendance records over to a tool like Airtable.

If you’re thinking about using Pabbly Connect, they currently have a lifetime deal. Compared to monthly pricing, the lifetime offer is very compelling.

Performance enhancements and more

We have found latency when passing data to our “premium” integrations like Google Sheets, Zoom, Slack and others a bit slow, and in the free version in particular, recipes couldn’t move to the next step until we had confirmation via the API that those transactions had completed. This could noticeably slow down page loads on a site if these actions were processed as part of a redirect or reload. For some API integrations, passing the data and waiting to hear back could take a full second.

Uncanny Automator 4.2 moves API-based actions to asynchronous execution, meaning those actions will be processed in the background to improve the user experience on a site. This is still a big change to how recipes run, so we look forward to your feedback on how this is helping you. If you prefer to keep the existing processing system, there is a new option in the settings to disable asynchronous execution.

(Developers: there are filters now to move other actions to asynchronous execution if you want to, but we would not generally recommend using this for WordPress plugin integrations.)

There’s one more trigger too for MailPoet users: A user submits a form. And for users of our Uncanny Groups for LearnDash plugin, there’s a new “A group is created” trigger so that you can specifically target LearnDash group creation by our plugin.

For our advanced users, we have added a few more enhancements:

• JSON strings are now supported in fields
• All WordPress Core triggers now have standard post/page/comment tokens (there’s a huge list so check the changelog for more details)
• Multiple actions gain support for custom values in tokens
• There’s a new review request system

And to round out the key new features in the free Uncanny Automator 4.2 plugin, we changed Woo token support so that if several tags, categories and SKUs are passed into a single token, we separate them by comma instead of using new lines.

Here’s the full changelog: https://automatorplugin.com/knowledge-base/uncanny-automator-changelog/

Want to hear something crazy? The Pro 4.2 release is coming later this week and it’s got an even longer list of updates.