PublishPress Future Now Has Powerful Workflows
I'm delighted to say that we've released a new feature called “Action Workflows” in the PublishPress Future Pro plugin.
We think this is something unique in the WordPress world and will be useful for many of you.
Action Workflows allow you to update your content using custom workflows. Here are some examples of what you can do with Action Workflows:
- Email the site admin when a post is updated.
- Change the post status to “Trash” a week after it was published.
- 15 days after the post is published, move the post to the “Draft” status and add a category called “Archive”.
- 1 year after a post is published, send an email to the author asking them to check the content.
These are just suggestions. Let's introduce you to Action Workflows and you'll quickly get ideas for how this can improve your site.
Table of Contents
Introducing Action Workflows
The best way to understand what Action Workflows do is to see an example. This image below shows a sample workflow. This workflow will automatically change the status of a post to “Draft” a week after it was published. In this screenshot below, we have four steps:
- Trigger: Post is saved. This trigger activates whenever a post is saved, regardless of whether it's newly created, imported, or updated.
- Advanced: Schedule. This step allows you to schedule the action. For example, you can set the workflow to run 7 days after the post is published.
- Action: Move post to status. This step will move the post to a different status, such as “Draft”.
- Action: Send Email. This step will send an email to any address you choose.
How to Build Action Workflows
We designed the PublishPress Future workflow builder to look just like the block editor in WordPress. You can drag-and-drop steps to build your workflow. In the screenshot below, we're adding a new action called “Move post to status”.
Each step can be inserted into the workflow using the lines that connect steps. In this image below, we've added the new action as the second step in the workflow.
If there are any required settings for your step, PublishPress Future will show a small warning sign. In this screenshot below, we need to choose the new status that the post will be moved to.
Watch a Video Guide to Action Workflows
What's Next for Action Workflows?
After months of work, we're excited to get this into the hands of PublishPress customers. We'd love to hear your feedback and ideas for more actions and triggers. Right now, we have these features on our roadmap:
- Allow workflows to update post metadata.
- Add “if” conditionals so that changes only happen if posts meet the criteria you set.
- Build an import / export tool so you can re-use your workflows easily.
The Best Plugin to Schedule Changes to Your WordPress Content
The PublishPress Future plugin allows you to schedule automatic changes to posts. You can update your content using custom workflows involving multiple steps.
This looks really interesting. Will there be plan to allow for external triggers from Zapier/N8n etc? Thanks!
Hi James. Yes, that’s the next step. We plan to start building integrations.
Nice one! I like the very gutenbergish react interface! nice work mate!
Thanks for the kind words. We do try and stick to WordPress design patterns whenever possible.
can we create a workflow that only affects articles from one or more of them Taxonomy category Name
This will be possible very soon. It’s scheduled for version 4.1 of the plugin that will hopefully arrive in October.