Pro 4.3: Meta Box and More

Following up on last week’s 100-integration milestone, Uncanny Automator is back with another big integration announcement: we now support Meta Box! The Automator Pro 4.3 release also adds triggers and actions for Easy Affiliate, Studiocart and WP Mail SMTP Pro for the first time.

Meta Box

Meta Box is a wildly popular plugin for WordPress developers and site owners that offers an easy way to create meta boxes and custom fields for any WordPress post type. With over 40 different field types, it’s easy to capture data for almost anything related to your users, courses, products and more.

Automator Pro 4.3 adds these new Meta Box triggers:

• A field is updated on a post
• A user updates a field on a post

With the new triggers, sites can do things like add users to a course or social group when a user’s profile field is updated, remove a CRM tag when another plugin updates a Meta Box value, etc.

WP Mail SMTP Pro

WP Mail SMTP Pro plugin support was added to Uncanny Automator as an integration in last week’s 4.3 release. In the Pro update, we’re adding 2 new triggers:

• In any email, a URL containing a string is clicked
• In any email with specific text in a subject, a URL containing a specific string is clicked

The use cases for click tracking are endless: tag users in a CRM, offload records to Google Sheets for analysis, set user meta to control future drip campaigns in Automator, etc.

WooCommerce

WooCommerce gets 3 new triggers in the Automator Pro 4.3 release:

• A guest completes, pays for, or lands on a thank you page for an order with a product variation
• An order is refunded
• A product’s inventory status is set to a specific status

Once again, we’ve got lots of powerful use cases lined up. When an order is refunded, remove users from a mailing list, remove them from groups, queue a series of emails, notify an admin, add the order details to a Refunded list in Google Sheets, etc. As for the inventory status trigger, this might be used to notify a site team in Slack that a product has low inventory, maybe even automatically unpublish a product.

The “Create an order” action for Woo also gains the ability to apply a coupon to an order. We had a good example from a customer about the existing Woo Create an Order action causing accounting problems since it created records for a dollar value even though no payment was collected. The support for coupons allows 100% off coupons to be applied to custom orders so this issue can be avoided.

Studiocart

The Studiocart was first introduced in Uncanny Automator 4.2, but this is its first introduction to Uncanny Automator Pro. This release adds 2 new triggers:

• A guest completes an order for a product
• A subscription is cancelled for a product

The first trigger opens up guest checkout workflows for users that don’t create an account during purchase. The second allows notifications for sales teams, email campaigns to customers to win them back and more.

Easy Affiliate

Maybe last week’s Easy Affiliate introduction didn’t include the triggers and actions you needed? Pro can help with these additions:

• New trigger: A payout is made to an affiliate
• New action: Add a new affiliate
• New action: Record a sale for an affiliate

There are lots of opportunities to use the new additions. Maybe when a payout is made to an affiliate they’re notified by SMS message. When a user submits a registration form with custom user meta, they can be automatically added as a new affiliate. And perhaps when a purchase is made by a specific WPForms submission, an affiliate is logged to a particular user.

BuddyBoss, BuddyPress & bbPress

Based on a lot of user feedback, we made these additions:

• New bbPress trigger: A guest replies to a topic. Use this trigger to fire recipes when anonymous postings are made to a discussion forum.
• New BuddyBoss action: Send a private message to a specific user. While we already supported sending a message to a user, this new version allows greater control over the user that gets targeted as the recipient.
• New BuddyPress action: Send all members of a group a notification. BuddyBoss already had it, now we’re extending support to BuddyPress.

FluentCRM

We’re not done with new additions yet! Our FluentCRM integration gains 2 new actions:

• Add a contact to a list
• Remove a tag from a contact

Where these differ from our existing list and remove tag actions is that these additions support people that aren’t existing WordPress users. No WordPress account is required for the users that are targeted in the actions.

New conditions

We have a ton of new LearnDash and WordPress conditions in this release. Conditions allow actions to be run or not run based on certain criteria, like a user having a certain CRM tag or access to a certain course. Here’s what’s new for LearnDash:

• The user has completed a lesson
• The user has completed a quiz
• The user has completed a topic
• The user has failed a quiz
• The user has not completed a lesson
• The user has not completed a quiz
• The user has not completed a topic
• The user has passed a quiz

So, going beyond the existing course and group conditions, now you can control actions based on lessons, quizzes and topics. Previously you would have needed a CRM to do something like the following:

• If a user enrolls in a course and doesn’t complete the lesson at the halfway point within 1 week, send them an email; if nothing changes after 2 weeks, notify their Group Leader.

You can now do personalized workflows like that entirely with Automator, no CRM required.

For WordPress core, these are the new conditions:

• A specific meta key exists for a post
• A specific meta key does not exist for a post
• A specific user meta key exists for a user
• A specific user meta key does not exist for a user

Certainly these are more for power users, but conditions like these have enabled us to offer all types of new solutions in support tickets over the past few months. There’s a bit of a learning curve, but once tackled, Automator is increasingly replacing what would normally require a CRM at a tiny fraction of the cost.

New tokens

We added some really useful tokens for BuddyBoss users for the “User makes a post to the activity stream of a group” trigger, including Activity media URL, Activity video URL and Activity document URL. Want to use activity stream post assets in other apps and contexts? Now you can.

The number of tokens available depends on your settings in the BuddyBoss media settings; here’s an example of how this is managed for activity media:

Gravity Forms gains a new “Transaction ID” token for forms that include payment fields.

Last, but not least, the WP Job Manager trigger for “An application is received for a job of a specific type” gets tokens for Job owner ID and Candidate ID.

Those are the highlights of Uncanny Automator Pro 4.3! For the full release specifics, make sure to check out the changelog.