New in Pro: Advanced Custom Fields (ACF) and More

Last week’s Uncanny Automator 3.3 release added some extraordinarily useful new features, including our new HubSpot integration, and it helped us break 100,000 downloads and 8,000 active installs over the weekend. We’re seeing phenomenal growth and some incredibly exciting features will be released before the end of the year.

ACF automation support for WordPress

In today’s Uncanny Automator Pro 3.3 release, we’re adding one new plugin integration: Advanced Custom Fields (ACF). We get a lot of questions from users about ACF use in Automator, and as a first step into wider ACF support, today we’re adding a new trigger for “Everyone” recipes:

• An ACF field is updated on a post

It can be any post type, all posts of a certain type, and any ACF field in a post. Now, when a field is updated (i.e. from a non-blank value to another non-blank value), you can trigger recipes against it. So if the release date of a course (as an ACF field) changes, you could trigger a Mailchimp campaign. If a user’s department changes in a directory plugin listing, remove one tag and add a new one in Active Campaign.

Here’s what it looks like:

To use the trigger, make sure you choose an “Everyone” recipe type and that your ACF fields are assigned to a specific post type. The selection in the Post type drop-down is what shows a list of available posts and fields. For more information, check out the new Knowledge Base article. And yes, support for ACF tokens in actions is coming soon!

New BuddyBoss, bbPress and BuddyPress actions

If you use BuddyBoss, bbPress or BuddyPress, you’re in luck with today’s release. Based on several requests from users, the following actions are all now available in Uncanny Automator Pro:

• bbPress – Subscribe the user to a forum
• BuddyBoss – Subscribe the user to a forum
• BuddyBoss – Follow a user
• BuddyBoss – Stop following a user
• BuddyBoss – End friendship with a user
• BuddyBoss – Send a friendship request to a user
• BuddyPress – End friendship with a user
• BuddyPress – Send a friendship request to a user

All of the actions are largely self-explanatory. One consideration here is that BuddyBoss and BuddyPress must allow these actions, so if you have trouble, make sure to double-check your settings in those plugins.

Triggers for MemberPress and WooCommerce

Besides our new ACF trigger support, MemberPress and WooCommerce each gain a new trigger.

The new MemberPress trigger, a user’s membership to a specific product expires, means you can run any actions in a recipe when a user’s membership expires. Common examples including removing things like CRM tags and group access, or running things like email campaigns and coupon generation to win the user back.

The new WooCommerce trigger, a product is purchased in an order, is where things get very interesting. Our existing Woo triggers cover all types of use cases based on orders, but we started getting more questions about running things for every product in an order. The most common example is passing data to Google Sheets. Existing Automator recipes would only send one row to Google Sheets for the entire order, but what if records were needed for every product in an order? That’s what this trigger allows: running actions on specific products within an order, and in some cases recipes will then run multiple times for a single order.

Other Automator Pro 3.3 Changes

LearnDash and Tin Canny users will see an important new option when resetting a user’s course progress with an action: the ability to delete associated Tin Canny data. That was a big one for our Tin Canny users. Even in the core plugin there’s no way to delete statements by specific course for specific users; now there is.

Finally, for Modern Events Calendar, there are new tokens for Featured Image and Featured Image URL tokens in the “user’s booking of an event is confirmed” trigger. This will be useful for notifications, social posts and other actions.

We hope you find the new features available in Automator Pro useful!