To understand how Uncanny Automator and MemberPress work together, it’s essential to grasp a few fundamental concepts. These will help you automate processes on your membership site more effectively.

1. Triggers & Actions

At the core of Uncanny Automator’s functionality are triggers and actions. Think of these like a cause-and-effect relationship:

• Trigger: This is an event that starts an automation. In this context, triggers come from MemberPress actions such as:
  • A user signing up for a membership.
  • A user canceling their subscription.
  • A user logging in.
• Action: Once a trigger occurs, it leads to an action. For example:
  • Sending an email.
  • Granting access to a course.
  • Creating a task in a project management tool.

In summary, triggers are the events that start an automation, and actions are the results or responses to those triggers.

2. Recipes

In Uncanny Automator, a recipe is what you create when you want to automate something. A recipe consists of:

• One or more triggers: The conditions that need to be met for the automation to start.
• One or more actions: What happens after the triggers are activated.

For example, a basic recipe might be:

• Trigger: User signs up for a “Gold Membership” in MemberPress.
• Action: Automatically send a welcome email to the user.

3. Automation

Automation is the process of letting the system carry out tasks without human intervention. This allows you to save time and ensure consistency.

In the context of MemberPress and Uncanny Automator, automation might look like:

• Automatically sending onboarding emails to new members.
• Giving members instant access to courses or digital content after purchase.
• Notifying your team if a user cancels their membership.

4. MemberPress Membership Levels

In MemberPress, membership levels determine what type of access a user has on your site. You can create different membership levels such as:

• Free: Basic content access.
• Premium: Paid, exclusive access to more valuable content or services.

Each of these membership levels can be used as triggers in Uncanny Automator. For instance:

• If a user buys a Premium membership, you could trigger an action to enroll them in a private course.

5. Membership Subscriptions & Status

MemberPress allows you to manage subscriptions and track their status. A subscription can be:

• Active: The user has an active membership.
• Expired: The membership has expired.
• Canceled: The user has canceled their subscription.

Each of these statuses can be triggers for automations. For example:

• When a user cancels a subscription (status: Canceled), Uncanny Automator could send them a feedback survey or a discount offer to encourage renewal.

6. Third-Party Integrations

One of the powerful features of Uncanny Automator is its ability to connect with third-party tools. Some examples include:

• Email Marketing Tools (e.g., Mailchimp, ActiveCampaign): Automatically add new members to a mailing list.
• Learning Management Systems (e.g., LearnDash): Automatically enroll users in courses when they buy a membership.
• CRM Systems (e.g., HubSpot): Sync user data with your CRM to manage leads or contacts.

This enables you to automate workflows not just within your WordPress site but also across your broader tech stack.

7. Webhooks (Advanced)

While this is a more advanced concept, it’s worth mentioning that webhooks allow you to connect Uncanny Automator with external services.

Webhooks are a way for one application to send real-time data to another when a specific event occurs. For example, you can trigger an action on an external service (like Slack or Google Sheets) when a user signs up for a membership.

Summary of Key Concepts:

• Triggers & Actions: The foundation of automation—triggers cause actions to happen.
• Recipes: The set of instructions combining triggers and actions.
• Automation: The practice of letting your site run routine tasks without manual work.
• MemberPress Membership Levels: Different access types can trigger different actions.
• Third-Party Integrations: Expand the functionality by connecting to other services.
• Webhooks: A more advanced way to trigger actions in external tools based on MemberPress events.