Tags are the way that AutomatorWP uses to pass information between triggers and actions.
Tags let’s you setup dynamic content on triggers and actions options, for example, on the “Send email” action you can send the email to the user that completes the automation or even, if you have added the trigger “User views a post”, send the email to the post author.
Using tags
When you edit a trigger or action option, you will see a button at right of some fields like this:
Clicking on this button, will show you the list of all available tags:
There are 7 different groups of tags:
Site tags
Those tags refers to information from your site like the site name, the site URL or the admin email.
At the moment you click on any tag, it will be added to the field (at caret position):
User tags
Those tags refers to information from the user that completed the automation and include different tags like the user email, display name, first name, etc.
Date and time tags
Those tags lets you place information related with date and time the automation was completed.
The date and time tag let’s you control the format that date will get displayed. You can find more information about this tag here.
Trigger tags
Those tags will appear dynamically every time you add a new trigger to the automation and they refer to information from trigger.
Every trigger has different tags, for example, the trigger “User views a post” includes tags to refer to the post visited like the post title, the post excerpt even the post author email.
Action tags
Similar to trigger tags but for actions, those tags will appear dynamically every time you add a new action to the automation and they refer to information from that action.
Every action has different tags, for example, the action “Create a post” includes tags to refer to the post new created like the post title or the post excerpt and the action “Create a user” includes tags to refer to the new created user like the user email or the user ID.
Function tags
Function tags lets you add functions, commonly to modify values, inside triggers and actions fields as explained here.
Special tags
Some tags have some special requirements like edit the tag with a specific parameter, as the user meta tag which requires the meta key to display the meta value. All information about those special tags can be found here.