A long-standing programme which enables university students to spend their summer vacation contributing to Open Source projects, the Google Summer of Code is a great opportunity to welcome new contributors to our community and grow awareness of Mautic.

Here are some of the project ideas that we have collected from around the Mautic Community (note these may change over time):

Idea 1 – Interactive walk-through guide for new users of Mautic

We know that for new users of Mautic, it can be a bit confusing knowing how to get from installing the application to sending their first campaign. We would like to make this process easier by including an optional product tour, which would highlight the key steps that a new user would need to follow in order to send their first campaign.

This project would involve firstly identifying what those steps are by conducting some user research and following the steps yourself, and then working with the relevant teams to create a product tour. You will need to prepare the on-screen content and resources, and explore what library or tool to use in order to deliver the on-screen tour.

You will then need to implement the tour within Mautic, and make sure that the content is fully translatable (as Mautic is available in over 64 languages!), working with our local communities to have the content you write translated.

[Source: Install / Upgrade Initiative nice to have]

• User Experience
• Medium complexity

Mentor: Ruth Cheesley

Idea 2 – Campaign import and best practice collection

Getting started with Mautic can be a challenge if you are new to Marketing Automation.

As marketers, there are certain types of campaigns that we run all the time eg birthday campaign, double opt in, abandoned cart etc.

We would like to be able to offer a template gallery of pre-created campaigns that can be imported into the Campaign Builder.

This project will involve developing a front-end interface that allows users of Mautic to view a collection of pre-created campaigns and select them to import them into the Campaign Builder.

You will work with our community to determine the most common campaigns that marketers need to use, and create a ‘best practice’ template that can be used for at least two campaigns. These will be used in the interface that you create, allowing the user to view and select from a list of available templates, and have those added to the Campaign Builder ready to be customised.

[Source: Resource Management Initiative]

• Core development
• Hard complexity

Mentor: Alan Hartless / Mohammed Abu Musa

Idea 3 – Create a PR testing tool for the Mautic Documentation/KB/Community Handbook

Currently it is very difficult to test pull requests locally with the Documentation repository, as this contains only the user folder and requires the user to pull down the entire site which most are not able to do.

We have a PR testing tool for Mautic – Mautibox – which has really simplified the process of testing pull requests and hence sped up merging contributions. This runs on an Amazon stack – see the Github repo for more detail.

We would like to create a similar tool to test PR’s for our Grav-based documentation at docs.mautic.org and our other Grav tools at kb.mautic.org and contribute.mautic.org.

• Infrastructure/Automation
• Medium complexity

Mentor: Dennis Ameling

Idea 4 – Create plugin safety checker

In Mautic 4.0 we will be providing a new Marketplace which allows users to view and install plugins for Mautic from within the application, using Composer 2 ‘under the hood’. With the new marketplace we would like to have a tool that would scan for newly added or updated plugins, and run a health check on those.  This would ensure that any plugins we list should be safe to use.

Some of the checks that we would expect to be included are:

• Does it use dangerous functions like eval or base64_encode
• Does it use insecure dependencies (See List security advisories)
• Does it push data to a 3rd party
• Open issues/PRs
• Run PHPSTAN to check for obvious errors that can be discovered by static code analysis
• Lower the health score if the plugin doesn’t have any tests.
• Try to install the plugin on different versions that should support and test that Mautic loads.

This would at least ensure that all PHP services are in a good place, that by installation the users won’t break their Mautic instance, and that the plugins have a basic level of good practice from the code standpoint.

The tool would also be able to add and remove the plugin or some of its versions to a deny list, which would prevent them from being available to install.

• Core development
• Medium complexity

Mentor: John Linhart

Our next steps are to wait to hear if we are accepted as an organisation, which we will know by the 9th March.  You can read more about how the Google Summer of Code works here.

Part of the application process is to present a list of ideas that, if accepted into the program, students can write proposals for how they would best bring that idea to fruition. The process is brilliant on Google’s part. Not only do the students have an opportunity to refine their technical, team building, and general communication skills; they also are able to improve and demonstrate their critical thinking to come up with a solution to a given idea and also their professional skill to publicly present it.

The team looked back on the feedback given from the community and came up with three ideas that seemed to be in high demand and would bring great additions to Mautic’s feature-set.

All of the following will require knowledge in PHP, HTML, Javascript, and basic SQL with emphasis on specific languages as noted in the ideas. It will help to have experience in Symfony and Doctrine but is not required.

1. Magento Integration

Magento is one of the most popular open source eCommerce solutions so it makes perfect sense that Mautic should be able to integrate with it! Leveraging Magento’s API, Mautic should be able to sync customer information as leads, track the lead’s ordering history, and detect abandoned carts.

Mautic should be able to use that information to segment leads based on products purchased, recent activity (i.e. placed an order within last X weeks or have not placed an order in X months), and order statistics (i.e. spent $1000 in last 1 month).

In addition to segmentation, Mautic should also be able to use campaigns to send dynamic emails that include abandoned cart products (with images) along with emails that up-sell, cross-sell, and reorder purchased products.

Finally, Mautic should have eCommerce specific reporting such as correlating revenue with specific campaigns.

2. Custom WYSIWYG Editor and Improved Builders

Mautic currently uses a combination of CKEditor in full-page mode for creating custom HTML landing pages and emails. It also has a custom-built drag-and-drop “builder” to build themed landing pages and emails. As much as we love CKEditor, it doesn’t meet all of Mautic’s needs.

Thus, we would like to see a simple, powerful, and beautiful UI for building landing pages and emails that doesn’t depend on the end-user knowing web programming languages. But it should still give the power user or developer the option to directly edit the HTML. It needs to support both “free-style” and file-based themes.

It should include drag-and-drop elements such as image, text, table, lead profile information, forms, and other Mautic tokens. There should also be a simple and beautiful WYSIWYG editor for text and a file manager for images.

Finally, it needs the option to add stylesheets and javascript files to the tag without having to manually manipulate the HTML. A strong design eye and skill in Javascript will be required for this idea.

3. Javascript Tracking with Heat Mapping

Mautic currently tracks website activity using a script generated tracking pixel. This method is limited to server values and whatever is appended to the image src as query parameters. Thus, Mautic needs a more powerful and flexible way to handle lead tracking using Javascript. This project should at least bring configurable page tracking (URL, title, etc), event tracking (clicks, downloads, video plays, etc.), and device tracking (device type, screen size, OS, browser, etc). Using the click tracking data, it would be great to include a heat mapping feature to see where end-users are most active on a website. Some backend coding will be needed so knowledge in PHP is required in addition to Javascript.

Google Summer of Code Background

Each year Google helps to coordinate and encourage post-secondary students to spend their “summer” working in an open source project. (Google Summer of Code) Google has the goal to increase awareness of the vast network of available open source projects in the world; give students real-life exposure to real-world software development scenarios; and ultimately create more open source code for the benefit of everyone. Successful students receive a $5,500 USD stipend which allows them to focus full-time efforts on their open source code project for the full 3 months. The entire program is done online and requires no travel.

This is the 12th year for Google to offer Google Summer of Code (GSoC) but perhaps even more importantly, this is the first year where Mautic will be applying to be a part of the fun. That’s right! Mautic will be submitting an application to be considered for the GSoC 2016 program.

Typically this is an extensive application process and requires a good amount of time and energy to be successful. Many applications are received and only a few are selected each year for inclusion. Due to the young(er) Mautic community some might think the Mautic community is not ready for such a commitment and responsibility, but Mautic’s application and GSoC project for 2016 will be lead by an expert.

Mautic Application Leader

Chad Windnagle has volunteered to lead the Mautic application this year. Chad has years of experience working with Google and the Summer of Code project as a result of his background volunteering in the Joomla! ecosystem. He understands the requirements for applying as well as successfully executing a GSoC program and the Mautic community is fortunate for someone of his caliber to lead this initiative. The application period for Mautic extends from 8-19 February 2016 with the student application portion being available from 14-25 March 2016.

Get Involved!

If anyone has questions, ideas or interests in learning more about GSoC or in particular Mautic’s application or focus areas please contact Chad directly at chad.windnagle@mautic.org for more information. (Hint: there might be a faster response found on the Mautic Slack chat).

There will be more details, timelines, and suggestions shared once the application is received and accepted by Google. At that time more information will be published on the Mautic blog along with various social media channels.