New Integrations: Zoho Campaigns & Thrive Quiz Builder

Strap in, because Uncanny Automator 4.14 is a big release with a lot more than just new integrations (although they are fantastic new additions). This update to our free no-code automation plugin adds some important features for WordPress developers and general Automator users.

Webhook action tokens

Yes, we’re going to lead with a feature that has been requested from countless site owners and really takes our webhook support to the next level. So what are “webhook action tokens”? Well, when you send data to other sites now via webhook, the other system receives it and that’s it. The recipe is done. But sometimes when that data goes out, the other system can send a response back. Maybe it’s just an acknowledgement, maybe it’s important data that you want to use in some way, or some JSON object you need to parse and action. With webhook action tokens, Automator can now listen for a response and allow you to use it in other actions in the recipe.

While extremely powerful, it is a bit complicated to set up and intended for more advanced users. The process basically looks like this:

1. Set up an outgoing recipe action first.
2. Use the Send test button in the webhook action to send sample data to the target webhook URL, like this:
   
3. Create a new action after sending the test, and in the action tokens for the Send data to a webhook action, look for the new action tokens to be available (see below). Response tokens will have a “Response – Token key” prefix.
   
4. Once the new action tokens have been added to your recipe, you can take the actions and recipe live.

Zoho Campaigns

Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing platform that streamlines designing, sending, and tracking personalized campaigns. With robust automation, analytics, and integrations, it fosters strong customer relationships while ensuring compliance with anti-spam laws.

Uncanny Automator has 4 actions for Zoho Campaigns:

• Create a list
• Move a contact to Do-Not-Mail
• Subscribe a contact to a list
• Unsubscribe a contact from a list

Certainly there’s a lot of focus here around lists and email campaigns. If you use Zoho, the new additions will make list management a lot easier, as you can now add and remove users from lists based on site activity, purchases, form submissions and more.

Thrive Quiz Builder

Thrive Quiz Builder is a powerful WordPress plugin designed to create engaging and interactive quizzes, driving user engagement and boosting conversions. With its intuitive drag-and-drop interface, users can effortlessly design customized quizzes, assess user data, and generate targeted leads.

With today’s Automator 4.14 release, we’re adding one important trigger for quizzes: A quiz is completed. With it, sites might add recipes that send a notification when a quiz is complete, unlock new content, initiate an onboarding campaign, send a coupon code, etc.

WordPress post triggers

There are 5 new triggers related to posts being published and updated in WordPress core. Here’s the list:

• A post is updated
• A post in a taxonomy is updated
• A post in a taxonomy is published
• A user publishes a post
• A user updates a post type

The obvious question is why we need the new options and why we’re splitting things up. One reason is that taxonomy-dependent triggers run on crons, and if crons aren’t working in an environment for some reason then the triggers might fail (and in most cases people were using them for “any taxonomy” selection, so didn’t need the cron). By having triggers without taxonomy options, we can fire them immediately and they will work even if crons are disabled on a site. The second reason is that we had some users run into situations where older “user publishes a post” triggers would fire on every update, whereas they only wanted them to run for the initial post being published. The new triggers for publishing target the initial publishing only, and the update post can then target update activity only.

And the rest

Everyone is talking about OpenAI right now, and it’s easily our fastest growing integration in terms of recipe usage. We’ve had a few tickets complaining about timeouts, however, as long prompts and high response lengths can take OpenAI too long to process. This causes some sites and services to fail if they don’t receive a response within a 30 second limit. In the Automator 4.14 release, we are rerouting requests back to sites in a way that allows us to force a default timeout limit of 120 seconds instead of 30 seconds. (There is a new automator_openai_http_client_timeout filter available for sites that override it, but the default value should be a lot more accommodating for slow OpenAI responses.)

WordPress Download Manager users: The new tokens for User ID, Username, First name, Last name and Email tokens will be invaluable for sites reporting on download activity. We had a number of requests for these additions from users sending download records to Google Sheets for analysis.

Developers, stand by for new documentation on https://developer.automatorplugin.com/ next week, as today’s release also includes a new framework for development that can slash the code required to build new integrations by over 50%.

For a full list of changes, make sure to check out the changelog.