New integration: wpDiscuz

Uncanny Automator 5.6 is a significant update, with one important new integration in the free release and several important new features. It also sets the stage for many new integrations and features in the Pro 5.6 release.

New integration: wpDiscuz

wpDiscuz is a popular commenting plugin for WordPress that encourages user engagement. In this new integration, Automator 5.6 adds support for the following in our free version:

• New trigger: A user submits a comment on a post
• New trigger: A user’s post receives a comment
• New action: Add a reply to a comment

With this integration, perhaps users are notified in WhatsApp when a comment is made on their post, points are awarded for comments via a gamification plugin, a welcome reply is automatically posted the first time a user adds a comment, etc.

Refactoring of redirects

The way Automator handles redirects in a recipe has been significantly rebuilt to better handle complex scenarios involving redirects, and also to improve performance when used in combination with certain other plugins. If your site uses xAPI or SCORM assets, for example, where there might be frequent polling of a page to track student activity, performance in connection with redirects should now be significantly improved.

Update multiple rows in a Google Sheet

In earlier Automator versions, recipes that used the Update action to update records in a Google Sheet would only update the first matching row that Google located. In 5.6, there’s now an option to update all matching rows instead of just the first instance. The new option looks like this:

Change post types

If you have ever needed to change the type of post for a post in WordPress, perhaps using a plugin like Post Type Switcher, now you can do the same thing automatically in an Automator recipe. Automator 5.6 adds a new action to the WordPress Core integration:

• Change the post type of a post to a post type

Want to change post types in bulk, even by taxonomy? With Pro and the Run Now trigger and post loops, this is easy. No additional plugins are needed. Maybe you’re switching LMS plugins and need to switch one plugin’s “lesson” post types to another’s “module” post types; Automator can now do that for you automatically.

Other new features

Our OpenAI integration adds support for the new gpt-4-0125-preview model, also known as GPT-4 Turbo preview.

For heavy users of API-based actions (e.g. Google Sheets, Facebook, etc.), there’s a new option in Automator > Status > Tools to flush the API log table. This table is used to capture data you sent to API services, so flushing this table means you can’t resend data for historical actions. We have seen API logs get quite large on some sites, so this is an important new tool.

The SureCart integration gets a new trigger for “An order for a product is shipped”.

For WP Job Manager users, there’s now token support for Dynamic Fields.

In WordPress Core triggers that use taxonomies, there’s a new option for “Also include child categories”. So you could, for example, create a recipe that’s set up to only publish blog posts to social channels if they’re in a “Social” category, and now it could include child categories under “Social” as well, so you don’t need separate recipes for each subcategory.

And for Hubspot users, there’s a new option to delete fields in the Add/update user (or contact) actions rather than setting new values or even making them blank.

There are a few other updates, so for the full list of what’s new, make sure to check out the changelog. There are also some very exciting features introduced in the Pro release that are also now available.

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.

See Full Bio