New integrations: EDD Software Licensing, Heroic KB, SeedProd

It’s the final Uncanny Automator release of 2023! It’s a big one too, with 4 new integrations, new log purging tools, new post creation options and more. And all of that is just in the free version of Uncanny Automator 5.4.

EDD Software Licensing

Expanding our suite of integrations for Easy Digital Downloads, the new Software Licensing integration adds 2 new triggers:

• A license for a download is creates
• A license for a download expires

These 2 new additions open up some interesting use cases. There are of course the obvious notification recipes, like alerting a user via SMS or WhatsApp when a license expires so that they can renew. Or when a new license is created, maybe the user is enrolled in an onboarding course or the details are logged in Google Sheets.

Heroic Knowledge Base

We’re big fans of the Heroic Knowledge Base plugin, having used it on this site and uncannyowl.com since we first started selling plugins (over 8 years ago!). It’s a great tool for organizing instructional articles on a WordPress site, and in the 5.4 release, we’re including the following new triggers:

• A user gives a positive rating to an article
• A user gives a negative rating to an article
• An article receives a positive rating
• An article receives a negative rating

Yes, the first 2 triggers are for Logged-in recipes, the latter 2 for Everyone recipe types. These triggers might be used to notify a content team in Slack to review an article if it receives 3 negative ratings, maybe an outreach email for support is sent when the user rates an article negatively, or maybe when an article reaches 5 positive ratings then it’s shared in social channels.

Thrive Ultimatum

Want to trigger some FOMO marketing initiatives on your website? The new Thrive Ultimatum triggers make it easier to build advanced scarcity-driven workflows:

• A user triggers an evergreen campaign
• An evergreen campaign is triggered

Maybe you incorporate sending new Woo coupon codes when a campaign is triggered, you enroll users in a free sample course for a trial period or you notify an account manager in Slack.

SeedProd

The new SeedProd integration gets one new trigger, but it’s a big one: An Optin Form is submitted. With this trigger, you might unlock sample content for a trial (perhaps with our Restrict Content addon for Automator!), generate and send visitors a coupon code, enroll them in a Zoom webinar, and track submissions in Google Sheets.

Log changes

There are some bigger changes happening to log purging options in the Automator 5.4 releases. In the free version, we’re adding 2 new options to the settings in Automator > Settings > General > Data management.

First, there’s a new option to delete log records linked to a user that gets deleted. When enabled, deleting a user in WordPress will have Automator find any log entries linked to them and purge them.

The second new setting comes from some high-use customers that had huge log tables with a lot of data. They only cared about logging In Progress recipes or recipes with errors, not successful recipes, so there’s a new option to simply not log records for recipes that run successfully. Certainly this can make troubleshooting a challenge, but for sites where things are running smoothly and it’s only important to track recipe issues, the new option could prove quite helpful.

The existing option to manually prune logs also gets new support for decimals, so if you want to, you can target much shorter purge intervals. A value of 0.25 days, for example, could be set to prune anything 6 hours or older.

New tokens

We had a compelling user request to be able to run actions based on the status code a webhook action returns to an Automator recipe. There is existing support for handling webhook response values, but we didn’t have a way to change behaviour if perhaps an outgoing webhook had a 403 error for permissions, a 500 error, etc. With the new token for a response status code, there are new ways you can track how external systems respond to webhook data.

WooCommerce triggers also gain a number of tokens related to fees and payouts, including unformatted order fees, shipping fees, Stripe fees and Stripe payout.

Add custom CSS and JS when creating posts

The existing WordPress action to create a new post had no support for custom JS and CSS code, and our use of TinyMCE meant that some could code be modified when it was saved. What 5.4 adds are new toggle fields to allow a safe way to add custom code to new posts, like this:

And the rest

There are several other new features and fixes in the Uncanny Automator 5.4 release. One is better support for recipes with no actions, only redirects. We’ve been surprised by how many sites are using Automator and recipes purely to add redirects based on user behaviour and no other actions. Based on some user feedback around how recipes with no actions should work, we have added support for additional redirect scenarios.

There’s also better organization of actions in a recipe based on schedule time, a daily health check of Automator records on a site, expanded Safari support in the recipe editor and more. For a full list of changes, make sure to check out the changelog.

Ryan Moore Director

Ryan Moore (MA, PMP, BCom) is the Cofounder and Director of Uncanny Owl, creators of Uncanny Automator and a suite of popular add-ons for LearnDash. Since 2013, Ryan has helped thousands of companies add elearning and automation capabilities to their WordPress websites.

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