Run actions on WordPress users in bulk

Uncanny Automator 3.4 is out with a new game-changing feature: you can run actions on multiple users at once, on demand.

But first, let’s get the bad news out of the way: this new feature, while in the free version of Uncanny Automator, is only available to users of our Uncanny Toolkit Pro plugin. As such, it is currently limited to LearnDash users who also happen to be running our Toolkit plugins, but we will make a version of it available to all Automator users in the near future.

Run actions on groups of users

Do you ever wish Automator could run actions on a set of users, not just when they perform actions, but whenever you want to? Maybe you want to add a set of users to a BuddyBoss group, enroll them in a Zoom meeting, reset their progress in a LearnDash course, export user records to Google Sheets, etc. That’s what this update allows; when you upload a list of users in a CSV file, Automator runs actions against them.

The new integration works with our Import Users module of Toolkit Pro and adds the following new triggers:

• A user is imported by the Import Users module
• A user is imported to a LearnDash course
• A user is imported to a LearnDash group
• A Group Leader is imported to a LearnDash group

It’s the first one that’s going to get the most attention, but the others are important to make sure we cover a variety of conditional situations. What these triggers say is that when a user is imported using our tool, it can pass through any actions that you set up in a recipe.

The only column that our importer requires is an email address, so this means that you can import a simple list of email addresses and the recipe will perform the actions against all users in the import file. Don’t worry, it doesn’t slow down the import process; actions are queued and performed in the background so that the site’s performance isn’t affected and there’s no risk of a timeout. Everything just works.

The possibilities are endless, and for LearnDash users specifically, this solves a lot of problems around performing bulk actions. Sites offering compliance training now have a way to batch reset user progress. Sites migrating to LearnDash can use imports to mark lessons, topics and courses complete to preserve progress. Site admins can issue certificates in bulk.

One important note is that you will want to be careful with how you set up these recipes and disable them after use. If you want to run an import and only have it perform the actions once for users, make sure you disable the recipe after your import, otherwise it will run the actions against your next import too.

Enhancements for Hubspot, WPForms and WordPress Core

Based on user feedback, we added a few other important improvements to this release. In Hubspot, we caused some early frustration with that integration by forcing site owners to choose between creating or updating a user–but not both. Now, when an action can create a contact or user, there’s a new checkbox that says, “If the contact already exists, update their info.”

WPForms gains new tokens for the form title, form ID and URL. And WordPress core adds a token for the comment contents for the “A user submits a comment on a post” trigger.

While perhaps not as visible to most users, we have added vastly improved error messaging (with specific instructions for next steps if anything fails during recipe creation), fewer API calls when viewing the dashboard, and even some accessibility improvements to improve placeholder contrast.

For the full list of changes in the Uncanny Automator 3.4 release, make sure to visit our changelog.