Automate repetitive actions with Prepr Automations
Over the last few months, our development team worked on the Prepr Automations feature. With Automations you can automate repetitive actions, which saves you a lot of time.
Cool examples:
- Automatically create and send a tweet when publishing a content item
- Automatically assign a user when a content item status changes to "Review"
- Automatically copy demo content to a development environment
This is how it works
To set up an automation you have to walk through 3 simple steps:
1. Select trigger event
Select the right content item event. Select the model and the status of the event you want to automate. Triggering events can be "Created", "Changed", and "Published".
2. Set additional filters
Filter on the right properties and conditions to proceed, and to create the right trigger. For example you can filter content items for a specific language or status.
3. Set the action
With this step, there are three different types of actions that can be performed. You can either create, update or delete a content item. We have set up a chronological automation use case that includes all three types. In this use case we show you how simple steps in a workflow are automated with the same content item.
Example use cases
A. Update content item
A cool use case for the update function is when you're editing a content item and you set the content item on review and you want (for example) your chief editor to review this content item.
Trigger: Content item is set to review Action: Assign content item to chief editor
B. Create content item
An example for the create function is when your developers need demo content in their development environment. If the article is reviewed by the chief editor and is ready to be published in the live environment, the content item can be automatically copied to another - in this case - development environment. The developers can use the demo content in their environment to test the website.
Trigger: Article is published. Action: Copy content item to another environment
Another example is when you've published a content item, a tweet with the same heading automatically gets created.
Trigger: Content item is published. Action: Make a tweet.
C. Delete content item
The last option is to make an automation to delete a content item. For example, when the article (as mentioned above) gets automatically deleted in the development environment when it gets archived.
Trigger: content item gets archived. Action: Delete content item.
And lastly, you can test your automation, and click 'go to content item' to see the result.
What's next?
We're proud to offer you these first automations and invite you to try them out. We will be adding more triggers, filters, and actions in the future, but first we'd like to hear from you. How do you like this feature and what use cases do you want supported as well? Please send feedback to your Prepr contact, or contact sales to learn more.