Uncanny Automator terminology

Before we dive into developing a custom integration for Automator, let’s explain some of the Automator’s terminology.

Uncanny Automator is an automation plugin for WordPress. So it all revolves around automations. We call each automation a “Recipe“.

For now there can be two different kind of recipes:

Logged-in – these will only run if there is a logged in user present and allow multiple triggers per recipe. For example, you can setup a recipe that will “wait” for the user to complete 2 or more specific actions e.g. purchase two specific WooCommerce products to send an email with a promo offer.

Everyone – these recipes will run for any site visitor and they don’t support some user-specific actions like “change user meta”. They are also limited to only one trigger per recipe, because we can’t store trigger completion history for anonymous site visits.

Each recipe have to have at least one Trigger and at least one Action.

Triggers are events, typically fired by WordPress actions or an incoming request.

Actions are anything that users may want to preform on the sites.

Closures are things that happen after a recipe is completed, such as redirects.

Both Triggers and Actions have Tokens – these are variables with values that recipe elements pass from one to another such as form values upon submission or product details upon purchase. These tokens can later be used to compile an email address or edit post/user meta.

With Automator Pro Actions can also have Filters that can contain multiple Conditions. Conditions usually check something like compare values or check some user status like course enrollment. A filter is just a group of conditions.

Automator Pro also adds Schedules and Delays to each action. Schedules will postpone action run to a specific date, while a delay will postpone the run for a specific period of time.

All Triggers, Actions, Closures and Conditions are organized into Integrations typically named after a plugin or service that they relate to (e.g. Gravity Forms, Google Sheets).

So to extend Automator with your own trigger or an action you will need to create a custom integration unless you want to add an action to one of the existing integrations.

• Uncanny Automator Terminology (you are here)
• Creating a custom Automator integration
• Adding a custom Trigger to an integration
• Adding a custom Action to an integration
• Adding a custom Automator Pro Condition
• Adding a custom premium integrations settings page