Read the previous reports here for Q3 2022, Q2 2022 and Q1 2022.

Q4 2022 sponsors shoutout

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective:

Over $100/mth

Webmecanik

Aivie

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

Dropsolid

Web Any One

Powertic

SMC

AudienceWare

Media Giant Design

Sales Snap

Comarch SA

Ferienhausmiete.de

Might.ch

EaseUS

Awisee

Under $100/mth

Avinash Dalvi

Dirk Spannaus

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart

Ruth Cheesley

DT Network

Spiderdev9

BSF.company

Henry Weismann

Wmd Solucoes Digitais Eireli

One-time sponsors

Season of Docs (balance of project costs)

Otto Duffner

Acquia Japan

Chris Hinds

Mautic Community Budget

We are just in the process of finalizing our budget for 2023, and I am pleased to share that we will be making 10% of our budget available to support our open source dependencies through the ‘Back your Stack’ initiative.

In the new year, we will be sharing a list of which projects we will be supporting in 2023.

Read more about the Back your Stack project in our blog post.

Maybe consider allocating a percentage of your company’s budget (or your own personal budget) to support open source projects that you rely on next year – it makes a huge difference to those projects!

Future of Mautic – mission, vision and strategy definition

At Mautic Conference South America I presented an update on our mission, vision and long term strategy for Mautic, along with our short term areas of focus.

Read more at mautic.org/future-of-mautic – I’d love to hear your thoughts. Feel free to reach out to me on the forums, Slack or Email.

Product Team update

Mautic 5 release schedule

Earlier this quarter we shared a provisional release schedule for Mautic 5, which was altered due to the amount of resources we needed and the lack of volunteer time in the community.

Thanks to a crowdfunding campaign we were able to hire some contractors to help us with the mammoth task that is updating Mautic for Symfony 5 support. Mautic is also matching the funds raised in this project, so the support of our financial sponsors is directly helping us with keeping Mautic updated and secure. If you aren’t yet sponsoring Mautic please do consider a regular or one-off donation of any amount on Open Collective or GitHub Sponsors.

We hit a few delays due to illness but the project is gathering steam!

We really do need Mautic users to help us with testing these updates – all you need to do is click a link to open a Mautic instance within your browser and test the area of Mautic that is being updated.

It’s a really great way to contribute if you want to see Mautic 5 coming out sooner rather than later.

Read more in our Community Handbook how to get started with testing and report your results and check the pinned issue on GitHub for the areas that need testing.

Marketing team update

Newsletter refresh

If you subscribe to the Mautic Community Newsletter (and if you don’t then, why not!) you will have noticed that our latest newsletter has had a great facelift thanks to the Marketing Team.

We’re always looking for interesting content to feature, so if you would like to help with writing, designing, translating or proof-reading the newsletter please join #t-marketing on Slack.

Pitch Deck

We are building a team to complete the Mautic Pitch Deck – a resource that the Marketing Team are creating to help people share what Mautic is and to support them in successfully pitching Mautic for projects.

We welcome any case studies that you might be willing to share – please use this template and send it to info@mautic.org or share in #t-marketing on Slack. Likewise if you would like to get involved in this project, please let us know!

Once the pitch deck is created we will work with our international community to make it available in other languages.

2023/4 events schedule

We are currently planning out our marketing strategy for the coming year, including events where we want Mautic to have a presence.

Do you know of events where you think we should be represented? Would you like support to represent Mautic at an event local to you? Please let us know!

Would you like to help promote Mautic at events? We have several events coming up where we need help to staff a stand, to submit talks about Mautic, and more. Drop into #t-marketing and let’s chat!

Events we are provisionally planning to have representation at so far:

• FOSDEM, Belgium – 4-5 February, we will have a community sprint at the event
• State of Open, London – 7-8 February, we will have a stand at the event
• Inbox Expo, Valencia – 27 Feb-3 March
• Drupal Developer Days, Vienna – 19-22 July, we will host a Mautic Developer Days event alongside the Drupal community
• MarTech Fest, Utrecht – 4-6 September
• DrupalCon, Lille – 16-22 October, we will be running a community event alongside the conference

Education team update

New Knowledgebase launched

If you missed the exciting news, this quarter we launched a new, fully multilingual knowedgebase for the Mautic Community. It’s integrated with your Mautic Forums accounts so you can log in and contribute articles without needing another account.

If your language is not yet showing as available on the Knowledgebase and you would like to help us with translating the user interface and content please drop into the Education Team channel, #t-education, on Slack (get an invite at https://mautic.org/slack). Maybe you could organise a local sprint to translate the content – it’s a great way to bring together the community!

We are excited at the prospect of having a knowledgebase that is easy to contribute and will contain tutorials, how-to guides and troubleshooting resources for our global community.

Season of Docs project completion

We are just reviewing and completing the last few sections of the updated end-user documentation, which was a project funded by the Season of Docs initiative. Favour Chibueze has been working for the last six months on updating, improving and replatforming every aspect of our documentation and we are planning to launch it with Mautic 5.

Developer Documentation almost complete

We are in the final stages of updating the Developer Documentation which is also being replatformed to Read the Docs, along with the End-User Documentation

Some of the code examples were really out of date and many of the resources needed to be completely overhauled, so it has been a really huge undertaking mostly driven by Dennis Ameling. We are planning to launch this to coincide with the Mautic 5 launch.

Community team update

Mautic Conference South America

What a great time we had in Sao Paulo with our second in-person conference, Mautic Conference South America!

With over 100 tickets sold and 30+ people joining the community contribution day, it’s our largest in-person event to date.

A full day of sessions with speakers from across the industry meant a really diverse audience – from Mautic experts to people who had never used Mautic before and were keen to know more about the product and the community.

It was great to meet with so many of our Brazilian community and to hear all the awesome ways that they are succeeding with Mautic.

Our next event will be held online – Mautic Conference Global in June 2023 (dates coming soon!), and we will shortly be opening up nominations for a location to host the next in-person conference at the end of 2023.

Local Communities and localized Mautic landing pages

Meanwhile, we are finally making progress towards our framework (technical and content) for localized Mautic landing pages in many languages.

Those are closely related to the structural improvements for our local communities. These are not closed user groups, but also spread the word on Mautic in their region and language – which involves maintaining aforementioned localized Mautic landing pages.

And… We are very happy to announce our latest Mautic Local Community, which is currently being founded in Cameroon!

Are you a local? Please get in touch on https://forum.mautic.org/c/international-by-country/mautic-in-cameroon/

Contributor sticker swag

Thanks to some magic from n8n and Sticker Space, anyone who contributes to Mautic will now be invited to claim a pack of stickers featuring the Mautic brand mark, logo, and our friend Mautibot.

Each month we will be processing new contributors, so look out for an email from us if you have made a contribution recently!

Let’s look at the numbers!

NOTE: There was a bug with our Community CRM which meant that PR’s created were not registered from November to February. This post has been updated to reflect the accurate counts, with the PRs included. Sorry for the inconvenience.

This quarter we have exceeded 6500 members in total who have engaged in our community (up from just over 5200 this time last year), with 465 active members over the last three months.

This year we’ve had over 1,700 active members with 2,210 contributions – when we consider that in 2021 we had only 1,152 contributions and the year before that only 916, this is a massive increase.

Over the last 90 days, our most active contributors (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Joey Keller 467

John Linhart 318

Bill F 266

Mattias Michaux 140

Matic Zagmajster 131

Michael Wolman 88

Sven Döring 87

Mohammed Abu Musa 84

Zdeno Kuzmany 68

Xavi Montero 66

Read more about what is defined as a contribution here.

Our most engaged contributors (based on the number of connections they have made with others in the community) have been:

Joey Keller 210

Matic Zagmajster 106

John Linhart 82

Norman Pracht 79

Bill F 75

Dirk Spannaus 71

Michael Wolman 69

Robin M 66

Zdeno Kuzmany 58

Ekke Guembel 47

Our top contributors this quarter (based on the number of contributions they have made) have been:

John Linhart 89

Zdeno Kuzmany 41

Mattias Michaux 30

Volha Pivavarchyk 22

Mohammed Abu Musa 21

Joey Keller 21

Mohammed Abu Musa 16

Artem Lopata 15

Salem Code 12

Dennis Ameling 12

The companies who were most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 1287

Friendly 465

Dropsolid 164

Smart Octopus Solutions 131

Webmecanik 113

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 111

Surge Media 88

Moorwald | Sven Döring 87

Aivie 87

Steer Campaign 85

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 191

Webmecanik 44

Dropsolid 32

Aivie 23

Steer Campaign 22

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 22

Friendly 21

Comarch 11

SonsOfPHP 10

Smart Octopus Solutions 6

Conclusion

It has been a really great quarter and a fantastic year for Mautic – with progress being made in many areas and continued growth of our community. A huge thank you to everybody who has contributed in whatever way, it’s most appreciated!

With our future targets of growing contributions both financially and practically, I have every confidence that Mautic will continue to thrive in the coming year ahead!

Q2 2022 Sponsors Shoutout

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective:

Over $100/mth

Acquia

Webmecanik

Aivie

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

Dropsolid

Web Any One

Powertic

SMC

QED42

AudienceWare

Media Giant Design

Sales Snap

Under $100/mth

Avinash Dalvi

Dirk Spannaus

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart

Ruth Cheesley

Eli Logan

John R White

Acquia Japan

DT Network

Spiderdev9

One-time sponsors

Manoj Kumar ($20)

Comarch SA ($5)

Ruth Cheesley ($60)

Beau Enslow ($5)

Magenteiro ($65)

Community Team update

Mautic Community Sprint – Budapest

It has certainly been a busy quarter for the Community Team, organising the Community Sprint in Budapest and more recently, our world conference, Mautic Conference Global 2022.

The community sprint was a great success, with a lot of progress being made in all teams and perhaps more importantly, welcoming new contributors who had never before made a contribution to Mautic, and getting them onboarded.

We also had some great evening socials organized by our local host, Joey Keller, exploring the local restaurants, entertainment and the world-famous thermal baths.

Community sprints are a great way for the community to come together and really ‘get things done’ – everyone who attended left inspired, excited, and with a lot of great memories to treasure.

We are looking forward to the next time we come together!

Mautic Conference Global

We took the decision to change platforms for this year’s Mautic Conference Global, and although it had some quirks, we feel that Airmeet was a far superior experience for attendees, speakers, track leads and sponsors.

With two days jam-packed full of fantastic talks from speakers both within our community and from the wider email marketing world, there truly was something for everyone.

We are planning to release the videos next week – thanks to the great work from our community contributors who have worked tirelessly to get the videos rendered.

Mautic Conference South America

At the end of Mautic Conference Global, we announced that the venue for the next Mautic in-person conference will be in São Paulo, Brazil. 

We are really looking forward to supporting our Brazilian community with holding a great conference in November!

Education Team update

Season of Docs project started

We were delighted to be awarded a grant from the Season of Docs programme this year, and we have hired Technical Writer Favour Chibueze to work for a period of five months on updating, migrating and improving the end-user documentation.

Favour is already working through the content and we value any resources or materials that you feel would be a benefit to be included in the documentation. Please reach out to Favour directly or through the Education Team channel, #t-education.

Knowledge base project kickoff

The Knowledge base has been one of the more neglected areas of our documentation resources, and something that is sorely needed by users of Mautic.

We are in the process of kicking off a new project led by RobM to implement a new, improved and fully multilingual knowledge base. If you would like to be involved in this project, please let us know in #t-education on Slack.

You might be wondering why we have documentation and a knowledge base, and what information should live where. We are adopting the Diataxis framework which will help to guide which resources belong in which locations based on user needs.

Marketing Team update

Substantial progress was made in the Mautic Community Sprint held in Budapest at the beginning of the quarter, with Ivana Rosic from Sales Snap joining the team as a new contributor and several of her team members providing additional support in promoting Mautic Conference Global.

We have moved to a new platform for managing our social media – HeyOrca – which allows for unlimited users and has a robust approval process including working with external stakeholders. This should greatly empower our contributors and remove the existing bottleneck of only two people being able to access the platform.

We are also working on a range of useful, informative articles for the blog, contributor spotlights, and updating the imagery that we use in the community to have a more modern feel.

Product Team update

The quarter got off to a great start with our first ever Mautic Developer Days in Ghent. Held alongside the already well established Drupal Developer Days, we had three full days of collaboration and troubleshooting some of the challenges faced with bringing both PHP 8 and Symfony 5 support to Mautic.

Although we were a small team, a great amount of progress was made, with over 50% of the must-do tasks being completed during the event.

Of course it’s not all hard work – we also got to see the sights and join some of the great social events organized by Drupal Developer Days, including a silent disco in a castle and a board games night!

While we have made a great start on the Symfony 5 update, we do have a lot of work left to do. If you would like to help with this, as a developer or a tester, please do reach out in #mautic-5 on Slack (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).

We have also had two minor releases this quarter, with 4.3 bringing many new features and bug fixes, two security fixes, and support for Acquia’s recently released Custom Objects plugin.

The 4.4 release this week included support for PHP 8.0, and many bug fixes – including some regressions from the previous release.

Focus will now shift toward preparing an alpha release for Mautic 5.0, which is already overdue. We do need more help with this, so if you are able to support a developer to work with our team for a period of time each week, it would be greatly appreciated.

Finally the Product Team are going to be re-launching their regular meetings, check out the updates in #t-product on Slack for more information.

Let’s look at the numbers

This quarter we exceeded 6,000 members in the Mautic Community, with 795 active members who have an average of 11 conversations per member.

Active members

Over the last 90 days, our most active members (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Bill F (748)

Joey Keller (587)

John Linhart (499)

Oluwatobi Owolabi (161)

Norman Pracht (150)

Ekke Guembel (149)

Pierre Ammeloot (139)

Michael Wolman (122)

Matic Zagmajster (119)

Favour Chibueze (117)

Read more about what is defined as a conversation here.

Engaged members

The most engaged members (based on the number of other community members they have conversations with) have been:

Joey Keller (307)

John Linhart (164)

Norman Pracht (141)

Michael Wolman (124)

Pierre Ammeloot (114)

Zdeno Kuzmany (110)

Bill F (99)

Matic Zagmajster (90)

Clark Reeves (63)

Mattias Michaux (62)

Contributions

When we look at contributions made, this quarter we have nearly doubled the new contributors across all our community channels compared with last quarter – up to 126 from 70 in Q1 2022. In total we have had 718 contributions tracked against 307 last quarter. 

Some of this increase may be attributed to the recent addition of GitHub Pull Requests and completed Jira issues assigned to a user being automatically logged as contributions, and also the speakers and team members at Mautic Conference Global, helping to shine a light on the contributors who are often missed in the statistics but without whose contributions the community could not function.

We are seeing a substantial growth in contribution over time across all channels, especially when compared with historical contributions. 

We are continuing to see growth in contributions to our GitHub repositories over time.

Individual contributors

This quarter has seen some new contributors entering the top ten list (based on the number of contributions they have made):

John Linhart (53)

Zdeno Kuzmany (26)

Mattias Michaux (17)

Tejas Navghane (17)

Favour Chibueze (16)

Volha Pivavarchyk (13)

Rohit Pavaskar (8)

Miroslav Fedeleš (6)

Dennis Ameling (6)

Mohammed Abu Musa (5)

Read more about what is defined as a contribution here.

Organizations contributing

The companies who were most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia (2231)

Friendly (591)

Webmecanik (273)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing (240)

Bluespace (161)

Web Any One (139)

Dropsolid (137)

Aivie (133)

Sales Snap (128)

Surge Media (122)

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia (240)

Webmecanik (50)

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing (34)

Dropsolid (27)

Aivie (27)

Bluespace (24)

Sales Snap (14)

Friendly (13)

Steer Campaign (12)

Smart Octopus Solutions (8)

Conclusion

It has been really fantastic to meet up – both in person and virtually – with Mauticians from around the world over the last few months. I am struck by the excitement and enthusiasm across the community and the dedication you all have to making Mautic and our wider community even more awesome than it already is.

We do have a lot of work to do this quarter to get the Mautic 5 release ready, and I will be reaching out to organizations in the community for help with getting this important project over the line. We are also working on starting some interesting initiatives, including improving the reporting and analytics features in Mautic, so do keep an eye out for more opportunities to provide input and support Mautic’s growth!

Q4 2021 Sponsors Shoutout

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective:

Over $100/mth

Acquia

Webmecanik

Aivie

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Waym

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

Dropsolid

Web Any One

Powertic

SMC

QED42

Marketing Heap

AudienceWare

Media Giant Design

Under $100/mth

Avinash Dalvi

Dirk Spannaus

Shamaeva Natalia

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart

Ruth Cheesley

Eli Logan

Jon Stephenson

First Mautic Roadmap

It’s an exciting time for everyone involved with Mautic as we grow our community and develop our product to meet the evolving needs of the Marketer.

I have often been asked about our roadmap and before today there has never really been anything that I can point at and say ‘this is where Mautic is going’ other than vague blog posts and forum threads.

Earlier this year I shared the first iterations of our plans for the future which I debuted at Mautic Conference Europe 2021 in my keynote. It includes some great features that we have coming over the next year.

This process is new for us, and we do anticipate that there will be some tweaks made over the coming year, so please take this as our first rough outline of what we are hoping to achieve.

Some of these features will be community contributed, others may be contributed by an organization who has built or worked on it as a project for clients and are providing it back to the community.

If you prefer to view this in visual form, please head over to https://mau.tc/roadmap where you’ll be able to view an interactive graphic, and if you have a Jira account for our community instance, see the progress at the task level.

Community Team update

Mautic Conferences

There has been a hive of activity in the Community Team this quarter as we kick off the work to prepare the next Mautic Conferences.

The team have put out an open call for help with organizing these events so that they are run and managed by our community rather than a couple of people – if you would like to get involved please join #mauticon on Slack and let us know how you would like to help. All the roles are documented in the Community Handbook.

Call for in-person event location proposals

The Community Team is inviting proposals for locations to host the next in-person conference after Mautic Conference Europe last year saw our first ever in-person conference in Hasselt, Belgium. Nominations are open until the end of April, so be sure to submit your preferred location!

In person Community Sprint

The Community Team is also organizing an in-person Mautic Community Sprint in Budapest from 2-4 May 2022 – I am looking forward to meeting some of you there and working together on several exciting projects across all the teams in the community.

Education Team update

Replatform of documentation

A lot of work is going on behind the scenes to update and migrate both our Developer Documentation and End-User Documentation to Read the Docs.

This will bring several benefits including:

• Being able to have multiple versions of our documentation so that we can maintain information for several major versions of Mautic alongside each other
• Allowing us to translate the documentation with Transifex and host multiple languages to better serve our international community
• Enabling us in the longer term to locate our documentation within our core mautic/mautic GitHub repository, so that there is one centralized repository for making features and bug fixes as well as contributing to the documentation which will improve the contributor experience.

We have also applied to the Google Season of Docs for a grant to help with the huge task with the End-User Documentation.

If you would like to get involved in these projects please join #t-education on Slack, or if you are comfortable with GitHub you’ll find the repositories at mautic/new-developer-documentation and mautic/user-documentation.

Marketing Team update

Would you like to write for the Mautic Community blog? Review and proof-read articles? Create imagery for our campaigns? Write the Mautic Community newsletter and onboarding campaigns?

The Marketing Team would love to hear from you!

We’ve had some great articles this quarter which you can find on our blog at mautic.org/blog.

Product Team update

Open source Friday Community Sprints

This quarter the Product Team has started to trial a new concept of encouraging businesses who rely on Mautic to contribute some of their time every Friday to help make Mautic even better. They are calling this ‘Open Source Friday Community Sprints’ which is joining an existing initiative to encourage open source contributions on a Friday.

There are already 7 Mautic businesses who have signed up to enable their teams to contribute to Mautic on Fridays – will you join in?

To start with this is a pilot in the Product Team but it is planned to roll it out more widely later in the year.

To get involved, join us in #t-product each Friday!

4.2 release

Last month the Product Team released Mautic 4.2 – the latest feature release in the 4.x series, which also included a security fix to the .htaccess file. Read more about the new features in the announcement post.

The Product Team has also announced with the 4.2 release some planned changes to the Mautic installation and upgrade processes which will be introduced over the coming releases, to remove the ability to update Mautic in the browser and eventually move to Composer being the supported method for installing and managing your Mautic instance.

Let’s look at the numbers!

This quarter we exceeded 5,500 members in the Mautic Community, with 634 active members who have an average of 10 conversations per member.

The majority of our members are from the forums, but a good percentage are also coming from GitHub and Slack.

Over the last 90 days, our most active members (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Ruth Cheesley 1135

Joey Keller 479

Zdeno Kuzmany 306

John Linhart 301

Bill 291

Ekke Guembel 191

Matic Zagmajster 176

Renato Santos 136

Oluwatobi Owolabi 115

Mattias Michaux 92

Read more about what is defined as a conversation here.

The most engaged members (based on the number of other community members they have conversations with) have been:

Ruth Cheesley 363

Joey Keller 263

Norman Pracht 179

John Linhart 139

Zdeno Kuzmany 119

Matic Zagmajster 85

Adrian 76

Michael 74

Mohammed Abu Musa 71

Eli Logan 65

When we look at contributions made, this quarter we have had 70 new contributors across all our community channels. In total we have had 307 tracked contributions.

We are continuing to see a growth in contribution over time across all channels, especially when compared with historical contributions.

Likewise we are seeing ongoing growth in contributions across our GitHub repositories:

This quarter, our top contributors (based on the number of contributions they have made) are:

Ruth Cheesley 70

Zdeno Kuzmany 37

John Linhart 33

Mattias Michaux 15

Volha Pivavarchyk 11

Dennis Ameling 11

Renato Santos 9

Joey Keller 8

Adrian 8

Matic Zagmajster 7

Read more about what is defined as a contribution here.

The companies who were most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 642

Webmecanik 247

Aivie 76

Dropsolid 49

CTMobi 31

Tu Wien 24

Steer Campaign 24

Friendly 23

TwentyZen 22

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 22

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 81

Webmecanik 37

Aivie 19

Dropsolid 15

TU Wien 5

Steer Campaign 4

CTMobi 3

Smart Octopus Solutions 2

App Civicio 2

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 2

Conclusion

It has been great to see the energy and enthusiasm coming about through our recent in-person events, Open Source Friday sprints and a real growth in engagement across the community, but as always we are always on the lookout for folk who can help us by contributing some of your valuable time with whatever skills you can offer.

I’m looking forward to seeing the realization of some big projects next quarter, including Acquia’s Custom Objects plugin being released, our next minor release which will have some nice new features and hopefully also support for PHP8, and our first alpha and beta releases of Mautic 5 which will be compatible with the next version of Symfony. I’m hoping to see some of you in Budapest in May!

The last two years have really felt like we have been catching up with ourselves, but we are starting to see a lot of progress, innovation and exciting ideas for Mautic coming through. Sharing a roadmap for the first time feels like we are moving out of the reactive mode and more towards a creative way of planning Mautic’s future. It’s great to have you along with us on this journey!

Q3 2021 sponsors shout out

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on GitHub Sponsors or Open Collective:

$100 per month and over

Acquia

Webmecanik

Aivie

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Nucamp

Waym

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

Web Any One

Powertic

New this quarter:

SMC

QED42

Marketing Heap

Under $100 per month

Weismann Web

Avinash Dalvi

Eli Logan

Tomas Poner

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart 

Khalid Zamer

Ruth Cheesley

New this quarter:

Dirk Spannaus

Product Team update

Mautic releases

It has been another busy quarter as the Product Team worked hard to get Mautic 4.0 released. It was delayed beyond our target release date due to some bugs that were identified during the testing of the Release Candidate, and a lack of community testers.

The first bug fix release was made on Monday, 4.0.1, with nine bugs fixed focusing on forms, in accordance with our new release process.

We also back-ported some security fixes to Mautic 3, which will receive security fixes for six months after the 4.0 release is made. Please update to 3.3.4 if you are not yet ready to update to 4.0.

If you use Mautic and would like to help us to test bug fixes and new features, please do let us know in the #t-product channel on Slack. We can help you get set up to test which will make a big difference! Get an invite to join Slack at mautic.org/slack.

RFP process

We are implementing a new process for feature development, initiatives and larger bug fixes which allows the Product Team to create a brief for a task and developers to share how they would plan to address the brief. Some of these projects will have a budget associated, some may require funds to be raised, others may not be funded. 

Read more about the RFP process here, and check out the opportunities accepting proposals here.

Marketing Team update

Monthly newsletter

The Marketing Team launched the monthly newsletter last quarter and we are seeing a steady growth in subscribers – we hope this will be a helpful way for you to keep in touch with what’s happening in the community!

If you would like to help with the newsletter, we would love to hear from you. Just drop us a line in #t-marketing on Slack.

Social media campaigns

In addition to the newsletter, we have been sharing videos from Mautic Conference Global across our social media channels, highlighting some great sessions and sharing other useful resources. Watching the videos on YouTube will also help us to qualify for monetization of our channel, another useful revenue stream to support the growth of the community, so please do watch them!

Community spotlight

The team supported the Mautic 4 release and have also reinvigorated the Community Spotlight feature, where we highlight contributors from the Mautic Community. This quarter we have featured:

• Nick Veenhof, who led the Composer Initiative
• Nikola Nedić, who developed the user interface for the Tag Management feature
• Adrian Schimpf, who led the Builders Initiative

Community Team update

Mautic Conference North America Europe 2021

We shared at Mautic Conference Global that we were planning to hold our first in-person event in Boston, USA, however due to the uncertainty surrounding covid-19 we had to take the decision to move the event to Europe. We will be holding the event in Hasselt, Belgium on 8th November 2021, with a community contribution day on the 9th November and a leadership team summit on 10th November.

The call for speakers is currently open – please submit your sessions before the 10th October. Speakers will have their travel and accommodation covered by the event budget.

There are also several opportunities to promote your organization and support the community as a sponsor, from our tiered sponsorships to bag drops and lanyard sponsors.

Tickets will be going on sale imminently – keep an eye out on social media and email!

New meetup group

We are excited to share that we have a new Mautic Meetup starting in Ghent, Belgium. Organised by Nick Veenhof and team from Dropsolid, we’re really looking forward to their first meetup being a great success!

If you think you’d like to start a Mautic Meetup group in your local area, please take a look at the guidance in our Community Handbook and drop us a message in #t-community on Slack.

Community Survey

We have now closed the community survey – a huge thanks to the 82 people who took the time to fill it out! We will be announcing the results in the keynote during Mautic Conference Europe, and on the blog shortly afterward.

Education team update

Updating the developer documentation

The Education Team has kicked off several projects this quarter, including the task of transitioning our developer documentation from Slate over to Read the Docs, and updating it during the process. This will allow us not only to localise the documentation, but also to version it – thus when we have major releases we can maintain multiple versions of the developer documentation.

The team are open to volunteers helping with this task, so if you’d like to get involved please join #t-education and let us know how you’d like to help!

Improving documentation for installing and upgrading Mautic

Work is also underway as part of the Install/Upgrade initiative to improve the documentation and resources around installing and upgrading Mautic. We hope to greatly improve the onboarding process for people who are completely new to Mautic, so that the whole workflow from downloading and installing through to configuring and starting to use Mautic is as smooth and user-friendly as possible.

We always need people to help with writing and reviewing the documentation, creating visual resources and video, and more. Please reach out to us on Slack if you’d like to contribute in this way!

Legal and Finance Team update

Trademark infringement cases

There are several trademark infringement cases which are being actively pursued, several have now been escalated to enforcement action. This is an important aspect of maintaining our trademark and ensuring that anybody using the Mautic name and brand are doing so in line with the Trademark Policy.

Let’s look at the numbers!

Across all our channels we are continuing to see a steady growth in new members joining our community, defined as folk engaging on Slack, forums, GitHub, Stack Overflow and Reddit.

Over the last 90 days, our most active contributors (based on the number of conversations) have been:
 

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 1257

Joey Keller 355

Adrian 201

Matic Zagmajster 163

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 135

Ekke Guembel (he/him) 123

Zdeno Kuzmany 115

Nick Veenhof 87

Michael 83

Don Bowman 77

Read more about what is defined as a contribution here.

Our most engaged contributors (based on the number of connections they have made with others in the community) have been:

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 488

Joey Keller 244

Norman Pracht (he/him) 220

Zdeno Kuzmany 140

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 113

John Linhart 103

Michael 102

Alan Hartless 97

Adrian 91

Mohammed Abu Musa 88

The majority of active members (539 over the last 90 days) were existing members, but we are continuing to see a steady volume of new members engaging for the first time across the community.

We are continuing to see a fairly steady flow of contributions coming into Mautic across all of our channels. Our top contributors this quarter are:
 

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 34

Zdeno Kuzmany 30

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 13

Adrian 12

Joey Keller 8

Nick Veenhof 6

Mohit Aghera 4

Patryk Gruszka 4

Lukassykora 4

Lukas Günther 4

The companies who are most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

 Acquia 1323

 Friendly 355

 Aivie 204

 Webmecanik 182

 Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 173

 Smart Octopus Solutions 163

 fits4all 135

 Dropsolid 87

 Agilicus Incorporated 77

 QED42 70

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 50

Webmecanik 36

 Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 15

 fits4all 13

 Aivie 12

 Friendly 8

 Dropsolid 6

 Agilicus Incorporated 4

 QED42 4

 Smart Octopus Solutions 4

Conclusion

It has been another great quarter in the Mautic Community, and really exciting to see new contributors coming through and making their first contribution.

I’m also really looking forward to our first ever in-person Mautic Conference next month. It will be so great to be in the same room as all the awesome folks from around the world who are using and contributing to Mautic. Please come if you can, and if you can’t, please share the event among your network – let’s make it a sell-out event!

There are so many opportunities to get involved with helping Mautic grow and improve, regardless of your skills or experience level – please do consider setting aside a few hours a week to give something back, and/or contributing to the community through our GitHub Sponsors and Open Collective. Every contribution really does help us to move forward together as a project and a community. Thank you!

Community partners

Last quarter we launched the Mautic Community Partners Program with five partners being eligible at the launch of the programme.

We are pleased to see new sponsors joining us during Q2, several of whom are also actively contributing to Mautic and working toward becoming partners.

Dropsolid will be the first such company who will be joining the Mautic Community Partners Programme at the beginning of Q3.

Q2 2021 sponsors shout out

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on Github Sponsors or Open Collective:

$100 per month and over

Acquia

Webmecanik

Idea2

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing

Friendly

Nucamp

Waym

Up.mass

Akaunting

Droptica

New this quarter:

Dropsolid

Powertic

WebAnyOne

Under $100 per month

Weismann Web

Avinash Dalvi

Marcel van Nuil

Eli Logan

Tomas Poner

Joey Keller

Roundabout Media

Jan Linhart

Khalid Zamer

Ruth Cheesley

We have also added an infrastructure supporters section on our sponsors page, to highlight the organisations who are providing us with tools for free or at a reduced price which help us to develop Mautic and our community.

Legal & Finance Team updates

This quarter saw some new features being rolled out by Open Collective which we have taken full advantage of.

Projects

We have established projects for each of the key initiatives and for our community teams who have budgeted line items. You will see these listed on ohttps://opencollective.com/mautic/projects.

This allows us to distribute our budget, and manage the budget independently for each project or team, from our central funds.

It also means that if you want to financially contribute toward a specific project or team, you are now able to do that. Simply visit the project, click on the menu on the right and go to ‘Contribute Money’.

We will be ensuring that all expenses relating to projects or teams are processed through the relevant project going forward, so that there is clear transparency over how the allocated funds are being used.

Going forward, we envisage that we could also use projects for meetup groups, community initiatives and local events to manage their own budget and receive funds from Mautic’s budget in a transparent manner.

Virtual credit cards

A feature we have been waiting for with some excitement has been the ability to request virtual credit cards. These are locked to a specific vendor and amount and can be used for one-off purchases or for regular monthly payments.

This enables us to pay directly for things like our forum hosting or tooling for our recent Mautic Conference Global event, without expecting someone to pay using their own money and claim it back.

We anticipate that this will also help us going forward if we need to expense things like travel or accommodation against a project, enabling us to create a virtual card for this purpose and have full transparency, while not relying on individual contributors being able to pay for things themselves and claim back at a later date.

Receipts are still mandatory and have to be uploaded to Open Collective after the expense has been incurred.

We have already been using this feature very heavily over the past few months, and it has really simplified our workflows.

Product Team update

Mautic releases

We have had a busy quarter, with the 3.3.3 release in April being the last planned release for the 3.x series. Once we release Mautic 4, the 3.x series will only receive security fixes for a period of six months, after which it will no longer be supported.

A lot of focus has also been on getting the Mautic 4 release ready for general use.

In May we made a Beta release available for testing and we have been addressing any bugs that have been reported by the small number of users who are helping us with testing.

A couple of these bugs have been quite a challenge, and we have also been working hard on some of the features that we wanted to include with the 4.0 release.

Some, like PHP8 support, will not make it into the release, but we have quite a few new features that will be coming, including a couple of our Strategic Initiatives delivering the first phases of their project plans.

There is currently an issue which is blocking the release process – the team are working on resolving this so that we can make the Mautic 4 Release Candidate release. After this is launched we will make the General Availability release following community testing. Follow this forum post for updates.

Changes to our release process

We have learned a lot over the last year with our monthly release cadence, and we are making a few changes to our processes.

These are outlined in the announcement here: https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/updates-mautic-community-release-process

In short, we are going to be planning what will be included in releases on a quarterly basis. We will consider a maximum of 25 pull requests which must be ready to be tested and mergeable at the point of the meeting date, for each release. We will also identify five issues that the Product Team want to see getting addressed.

We will have a named release team for each release consisting of a release lead and assistant release lead.

We will also be continuing the theme we started last quarter with having themes for releases. Please read the announcement for further details.

Make sure that you add the release planning meeting dates to your calendar if you want to have a say in what is included in the forthcoming releases!

Marketing Team update

New team lead

Q3 has also seen a change in leadership for the Marketing Team. Radu Zlatianu has stepped down as team lead after setting up and leading the team since we first created the governance structure. We thank him for his work and leadership over this time!

Oluwatobi Owolabi has been the Assistant Team Lead alongside Radu, and has stepped up to the Team Lead role. We are looking forward to appointing an Assistant Team Lead – if you have experience in Marketing and would like to support the community by sharing your expertise please do consider stepping up to support the team!

Mautic instance established

We established our own Mautic instance in Q2 hosted on Acquia’s Campaign Studio – if you received emails from us about Mautic Conference Global you will already have benefited from this!

We are in the process of re-consenting all existing contacts from our old instance, but if you would rather not wait please do join our mailing lists here: https://www.mautic.org/community/get-involved/mailing-lists

Mautic Community Newsletter

We are going to be starting a monthly Mautic Community Newsletter on the first of each month, which Oluwatobi is leading. If you would like to join the working group, please join #wg-mautic-newsletter on Slack.

Community Team update

Mautic Conference Global

Q2 has been a busy one for the Community Team, with our second ever World Conference being held on 16-17 June. What a huge success! Nearly 300 Mauticians gathered together to learn, share and network.

Videos will be made available on YouTube shortly once we have finished rendering them.

We are tentatively planning an in-person event in November 2021 and will be sharing more information on that in due course.

FundOSS

Mautic was selected to be one of the 56 open source organisations taking part in the first round of the FundOSS pilot – an innovative approach to raising funds for open source projects.

A huge thank you to everybody who supported us during the two-week funding round – we raised $1,411 from 52 donors which was matched with $3,621 from the $75,000 fund. This money (minus transaction fees) has already been transferred to our Open Collective.

New Mautic Meetup group

We are excited to share that we have a new Mautic Meetup starting in València, Spain. Organised by Julio Roldos and Joan Serra, we’re really looking forward to their first meetup being a great success!

If you think you’d like to start a Mautic Meetup group in your local area, please take a look at the guidance in our Community Handbook and drop us a message in #t-community on Slack.

Community Survey

During Mautic Conference Global, I launched the first Mautic Community Survey which we are planning to repeat on an annual basis to learn more about how people are using Mautic, what they think about Mautic, and where the community feels we should be focusing our attention.

Please do take a moment to complete the survey, read more about it in the announcement here: https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/announcing-first-mautic-user-survey.

Let’s see the numbers!

We are continuing to see a steady growth throughout the year in members joining our community, defined as folk engaging on Slack, forums, GitHub, Stack Overflow and Reddit.

Over the last 90 days, our most active contributors (based on the number of conversations) have been:

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 1649

Nick Veenhof 354

Joey Keller 307

Ekke Guembel (he/him) 174

Zdeno Kuzmany 142

Norman Pracht (he/him) 135

Bob Clough 106

Michael 104

Adrian 89

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 86

Our most engaged contributors (based on the number of connections they have made with others in the community) have been:

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 573

Norman Pracht (he/him) 255

Joey Keller 240

Zdeno Kuzmany 126

John Linhart 105

Mohammad Abu Musa 101

Michael 100

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 91

Eli Logan 89

imihandstand 80

The majority of active members (621 over the last 90 days) were existing members, but we are also seeing a steady volume of new members engaging for the first time across the community.

We are continuing to see a fairly steady flow of contributions coming into Mautic across all of our channels. Our top contributors this quarter are:

Zdeno Kuzmany 46

Ruth Cheesley (she/her) 36

Dennis Ameling (he/him) 19

Saurabh Gupta 12

Nick Veenhof 11

Ekke Guembel (he/him) 11

Rahul Shinde 10

Miroslav Fedeleš 10

Joey Keller 9

Adrian 7

The companies who are most active in the Mautic Community (based on the number of conversations) are:

Acquia 1835

Dropsolid 354

Friendly 313

Webmecanik 290

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 179

Aivie (Idea2) 99

QED42 75

Favcy 74

Harmut.io 25

Merkur 22

The companies who are contributing the most to the Mautic Community (based on the number of contributions) are:

Acquia 77

Webmecanik 48

Dropsolid 11

Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing 11

Friendly 9

Aivie (Idea2) 7

Steer Campaign 2

Marketing Heap 2

Facet Interactive 1

Harmut.io 1

Conclusion

Some great collaboration happening across the community this quarter resulting in several projects coming to completion and a wonderful two days at Mautic Conference Global. There is much to do in the coming quarter, so please do think about getting involved! Join us on Slack at https://mautic.org/slack and head over to #Community where we can help you find where to get started with contributing!

This also marks a year since I started doing these posts, and I would like to take a moment to recognise the huge amount of progress that has been made – especially given the challenging situation we all find ourselves in during the global pandemic.

Some highlights for you:

• Establishing a governance structure and teams (Q1 2020)
• Running our first virtual sprint (Q2 2020)
• Appointing a full time Project Lead (Q2 2020)
• Launching Mautic 3.0 (Q2 2020)
• Holding the first ever worldwide conference, MautiCon 2020 (Q4 2020)
• Established ways to financially support Mautic and provide transparency over the budget with Open Collective and GitHub Sponsors (Q4 2020)
• Kicked off the first of our Strategic Initiatives (Q4 2020)

If you would like to read the previous posts in full here are the links:

Q1 2021 sponsors shout out

A big thank you to the sponsors who have supported us this quarter on Github Sponsors or Open Collective:

$100 per month and over

• Acquia
• Webmecanik
• Idea2
• Leuchtfeuer Digital Marketing
• Friendly
• Nucamp
• Waym
• Up.mass
• Akaunting
• FluxxIT
• Droptica

Under $100 per month

• Weismann Web
• Avinash Dalvi
• Marcel van Nuil
• Eli Logan
• Tomas Poner
• Joey Keller
• Luis Rodriguez
• Roundabout Media
• Jan Linhart 
• Khalid Zamer
• Ruth Cheesley

Security release

In January 2021 we made the first major security release to fix two vulnerabilities that were responsibly reported to the team. We have also put together some formal documentation on how we manage security reports in the community, how we work on issues and make security releases which you can find here.

As a result of this, we also applied to become a CVE Numbering Authority and we were granted that status on 26th February. This means that anybody finding a vulnerability will have to report them to the Mautic Security Team in order to obtain a CVE number. 

Mautic 3.3

Our third feature release for Mautic came out on schedule on the 22nd February – a huge thank you to everyone who contributed in any way to this release!

There were several new features in the release which you can read about here – probably the most notable being the beta release (meaning we are still working on some outstanding bugs and invite your feedback) of the new and modernised email and landing page builder. If you would like to try it, read the documentation here and then enable it in your plugins.

Season of Docs Project Completions

A huge congratulations to Favour Kelvin and Swati Thacker who successfully completed their Season of Docs projects! Read more about the projects and how they have impacted on the Mautic Project here.

Favour has since stepped up to lead the Education Team and we are looking forward to her leadership of the team helping us to improve the documentation we have available.

We would also like to extend our appreciation to Google Open Source for the $1,000 contribution that was received as the stipend for mentoring our technical writers.

Announcing Mautic Conference Global 2021

After the huge success of MautiCon 2020, the team have kicked off preparations for Mautic Conference Global 2021 which will take place over two days on the 16-17 June, with a training day on the 15th June.

At the time of writing all Gold sponsorships have sold out and there are only three Silver sponsorships available, which is great news! Tickets will be on sale shortly and the agenda will be announced A big thank you to everyone who is supporting this great event!

We are also tentatively planning our first ever in-person conference (subject to the COVID-19 situation) for November 2021.

Spreading the word about Mautic

We have had a presence at two major events this quarter – FOSDEM in February and Inbox Expo in March.

Both were a great way to raise awareness of Mautic and get to chat with people about Marketing Automation. We are always on the lookout for events and opportunities to showcase Mautic – if you have some ideas or would like to help with this, please join #t-marketing on Slack (get an invite at https://mautic.org/slack).

Funding in the Mautic Community

I shared our thoughts on how we are taking some steps toward funding in the Mautic Community, including implementing Bountysource on GitHub and allocating budget to support strategic initiatives.

You can read more in the blog post here.

Code metrics

During Q1 2020 in the core mautic/mautic repository we saw:

• 379 commits (383 last quarter, 1881 in 2020)
• 179 new pull requests (170 last quarter, 644 in 2020)
• 136 new issues created (116 last quarter, 621 in 2020)
• 148 issues closed (184 last quarter, 1181 in 2020)

We have seen gradual improvements to the metrics relating to how we deal with issues and pull requests:

• Median review duration (pull requests) 1.04 days (9.02 days last quarter, 7.11 days in 2020)
• Median time to close (issues) 78.77 days (87.92 days last quarter, 309.95 days in 2020)

As you can appreciate, having over 170 new pull requests and over 100 new issues per quarter, it is quite a challenge to keep on top of them and get issues fixed / pull requests merged into the releases! This is why we really need your help to test pull requests – this can be done by anybody with a computer available who knows how to use Mautic.

In mautic/mautic we have had:

• 39 authors according to Git commits (35 last quarter, 28 in Q1 2020, 82 in 2020)
• 83 issue authors (92 last quarter, 76 in Q1 2020, 332 in 2020)
• 42 pull request submitters (39 last quarter, 33 in Q1 2020, 94 in 2020)

Of these, we welcomed:

• 19 new authors according to Git commits (16 last quarter, 12 in Q1 2020, 53 in 2020)
• 51 new issue creators (49 last quarter, 43 in Q1 2020, 248 in 2020)
• 19 new pull request submitters (17 last quarter, 16 in Q1 2020, 62 in 2020)

You can learn more on the Community Dashboard at https://dashboard.mautic.org or on our public cauldron.io dashboard.

Conclusion

It has been a really exciting start to the year with lots of work on initiatives getting underway! We are looking forward to the Mautic 4 release and also the return of our world conference – there is always a need for folks to help out in the community, do join us on Slack if you are interested at https://mautic.org/slack.

Let’s kick off a roundup of all the awesome things that have happened this quarter!

Read the previous reports here for Q3 2020, Q2 2020 and Q1 2020.

Our first Mautic World Conference

November 2020 saw us run the first ever World Conference for the Mautic Community, MautiCon 2020. We were determined to hold an event that was welcoming to our worldwide community and as inclusive as possible.

With six tracks running simultaneously throughout the day, 17 sponsors, 51 speakers and 65 sessions across seven languages with 333 attendees, by all accounts it was a huge success!

Furthermore, the event generated just over $13,000 for the Mautic Community which has been transferred over to our Open Collective, in addition to the $595 that was received from Spreadshirt commissions on purchases from our Official Mautic Swag Shop.

This absolutely would not have been possible without the support of our amazing sponsors and the MautiCon 2020 Working Group, who put in endless hours of work behind the scenes to make the event happen. We would also like to extend a big thank you to the team from Veertly who expertly hosted the event on their platform.

If you missed some of the talks from MautiCon, don’t worry – they are all available on our YouTube channel here – make sure that you subscribe to get notified when we release new videos!

Initiatives, Tiger Teams and Working Groups

During my keynote at MautiCon I outlined my vision for the coming years and announced six strategic initiatives which we will be focusing on this year. These include:

• Composer support

• Email and landing page builders

• Install and upgrade experience

• Mautic Marketplace

• Mautic Next Generation

• Resource Management

You can read more about each and get updates on progress from their Confluence page.

Watch the keynote on YouTube:

Product updates

We fixed 93 bugs this quarter in our patch and minor releases, all of which were released on time in accordance with our release schedule.

We also merged 30 features and enhancements this quarter including releasing Mautic 3.2 , bringing improvements both to the product itself and to our behind-the-scenes tooling which has massively simplified the process of making a new release.

With Mautic 2 coming to the end of security support in December 2020 , we are expecting to see a significant reduction in the 2,000+ active Mautic instances running the 2.x version in the coming months.

Despite a lot of hard work we were not able to hit our target of getting the open Pull Requests and Issues under 100 by the end of the year – but we are still chasing the goal!

Code related metrics

We continue to see relative stability when it comes to commits being merged over time, which we would expect at this stage of the project. As we start to work on new initiatives, we are expecting to see increases in activity.

We are also continuing to see a growth in commits from the community – this chart excludes commits from Mautic Inc./Acquia.

When we break this down by organisation we can see who are supporting Mautic, with the top organisations this quarter being Webmecanik, Fits 4 All (Dennis Ameling) and Acquia.

We continue to attract new developers to Mautic as demonstrated below, which shows the number of developers that made their first commit by month.

When considering those contributing to Mautic Core, we can see that there has been a fluctuating number of contributors active across the quarters this year. We anticipate that this will smooth out and grow over the coming year, with more regular and core contributors who are consistently contributing to Mautic throughout the year.

The Product Team are continuing in their efforts to work through the backlog of issues which is reflected in the Backlog Management Index (BMI) below – defined as the number of closed issues divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time, and the lead time – the time expressed in days between the initiation and completion of a production process, in this case, an issue.

As we are closing some very old issues in this process we expect to see fluctuations for some time in the lead time.

The Product Team have recently implemented a Stalebot which will automatically tag stale issues with no recent updates and after a specified time has elapsed with no further activity, the issue will be closed.

As Mautic 2 is now formally outside of support, any issues which relate to Mautic 2 will be closed unless they are reproduced in Mautic 3.

We are continuing to see a fairly consistent number of pull requests coming in from across the community, with the top organisations contributing this quarter being Webmecanik, Acquia and Fits 4 All (Dennis Ameling).

Our regular release cadence means that we are just about able to keep pace with the incoming pull requests while working through the older ones, which have often required extensive work to bring them up to date and ensure good automated test coverage. The chart below shows that we do have a small number of older pull requests outstanding but the majority are from 2019 and later, which have a plan for getting them merged.

Accordingly, our efficiency at merging pull requests is continuing to remain relatively stable, as can be seen from the chart below. This demonstrates the Review Efficiency Index (REI), defined as the number of closed pull requests divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time.

With an average of only 17 active contributors over the past quarter we are slightly below the 5-year average demonstrated by the red line, with the average over the past 12 months being 18 contributors.

We would love to see this grow in the coming years as we welcome more contributors with the development of our community and the start of our Strategic Initiatives.

When considering the community as a whole across all Github repositories, Slack, Forums and Meetup, we are continuing to see above average engagement and a very slight positive trend line against the five-year average.

This year has seen a very positive change in community engagement and is a solid base for us to continue to grow over the coming months and years.

Conclusion

This has been a very full quarter with a huge amount of energy being put into our first ever Mautic World Conference and launching our plans for the future of Mautic.

Alongside that we have kept pace with our release schedule and continue to see growth across the community – all of this at the height of the global pandemic – quite an achievement!

I am excited for what the future holds and look forward to an exciting year ahead!

Read the previous reports here for Q2 2020 and Q1 2020.

This quarter has seen steady progress being made in several areas of the community, and work beginning on some big projects that will be happening over the next few months.

We have been following through on our commitment to setting up the conditions for a community that is supportive and welcoming to all, with a review of our Code of Conduct being published and the creation of a new space on Slack for LGBTQIA+ members (or allies) in the Mautic community who want to connect and/or talk about inclusion in the community.

Now for some updates from our teams.

Community Team

The Community Team have been working behind the scenes to put together MautiCon 2020 – our first World Conference – which will be held virtually on the 17th November 2020. Sponsorship packages are selling out quickly and tickets are available on a ‘give what you can’ basis starting from $5.

We have received almost 60 session submissions from around the world, and I’m excited to see a lineup of diverse speakers sharing everything from how to run Mautic at scale to how they created a thriving meetup group and best practices for using Marketing Automation. We even have a track for Community and Open Source where we’re welcoming speakers from other sectors and projects who will be giving some fantastic talks.

Product Team

The Product Team have hit all the release dates for the quarter, with sprints being held on the Friday and Saturday prior to the release freeze and Release Candidates being made available for a week prior to each stable release being issued.

We have released 3.0.2, 3.1 and 3.1.1 over the past three months, and welcomed a new Release Leader, Mohammed Abu Musa, who led the 3.1.1 release in September supported by Dennis Ameling.

We had some great new features ship with 3.1 – make sure you check them out!

Considerable effort has been made to clean up our issue queue and ensure that all pull requests have been assigned to a milestone, properly triaged, and the authors know what the next steps are to get their contributions merged.

This is reflected in the great progress being made with regards to reducing the open issues and pull requests, making it much easier for the team – and potential contributors – to see what needs work and when their contributions could expect to be merged.

The team also updated the governance process that is used when reviewing issues and pull requests, which you can read more about in this blog post.

Education Team

The Education Team has been working closely with our Season of Docs candidates and just launched the new Knowledgebase on 1st October which is already growing in popularity – if you want to contribute something, take a look at the detailed contribution page and the team backlog which has a list of articles they would like to include.

Legal & Finance Team

The Legal and Finance team recently published an update to the Trademark Policy and implemented a process for people to request a license to use the Mautic Trademark, as well as reporting infringements and asking questions.

We also launched Open Collective and Github Sponsors as a way of managing the finances of the Mautic project. It has been a great success with several organisations and individuals becoming contributors already.

Open Collective is also being used to manage the finances for the MautiCon event, which allows for full transparency over incoming funds and outgoing expenses.

A financial policy has also been created which explains what the Mautic Project will cover in regards to expenses, and the associated financial processes.

Marketing Team

Work is underway to re-initiate the Mautic Community newsletter and mailing lists which we expect to be completed by the end of the year. There is also a ‘meet the contributor’ series which is about to be launched for the Community Blog.

The Marketing Team are particularly short of contributors, so if you would like to help please do get in touch with them via the #t-marketing Slack channel.

Code-related metrics

Things are continuing to move forward with each new release of Mautic, and we are getting into the rhythm of our monthly releases.

The contributions we are seeing to Mautic’s core Github project have largely stabilised after the work to release 3.0 saw a large spike in commits.

What is good to see is the rise in contributions from the community. The chart below shows all contributions excluding those from Mautic Inc/Acquia and we can see a strong increase over the past months.  We hope that this will continue to grow as we move forward!

We continue to attract new developers who are submitting pull requests to the Mautic repository, with the chart below showing where a contributor has made their first contribution during that month.

We are also seeing a rise in the proportion of contributors who are considered ‘regular’ and a drop in casual contributors, which suggests that this quarter we saw more contributions from core and regular contributors than casual contributors.

• Core: those contributing 80% of the activity.
• Regular: those contributing the next 15% of the activity.
• Casual: those contributing the last 5% of the activity.

With a continued effort by the Triage Team to close down old issues, respond and deal with new issues and make sure that there is a speedy response, we have seen one of the highest rates of efficiency at managing issues – BMI.

This suggests that we are getting better at dealing with open issues, and becoming more consistent with our triage process.

For reference, Backlog Management Index (BMI), is defined as the number of closed issues divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures our efficiency at closing issues.

We expect this to drop somewhat over the next quarters having dealt with the majority of the 900+ open issues, as we settle into a rhythm when it comes to managing our issue queue.

We have seen a significant improvement in the median Time to Close this quarter, going from 11.439 days last quarter to 2.913 days this quarter, which means that issues are getting dealt with much more promptly.

As we are closing down old issues we are still seeing spikes in the lead time – the time it takes for an issue to be closed – but we expect this to stabilise soon with the establishment of our Triage Team.

Moving on to pull requests, we are continuing to see a growth in pull requests from the community over time, which is great! The Product Team are working on the resources we have available to help people contributing to Mautic for the first time – take a look at the onboarding resources here.

We are continuing to work through the backlog of pull requests (over 300 at the start of the year!) and with the 3.1.2 release we finally dipped under 200 open PR’s!  

Our aim is to get that under 100 by the end of this quarter, so we have a lot of work to do!

The chart below shows open and closed pull requests based on when they were originally submitted – the red areas show that we do still have some very old pull requests that need to be merged, many of which need to be updated for Mautic 3 or have automated test coverage improved before they can be merged.

If you’d like to help us with that, please do join #t-product on Slack (get an invite at https://mautic.org/slack if you’re not already on Slack!) as we would welcome help on this task!

Accordingly, we are gradually improving our efficiency at processing pull requests with each release we make as you can see below. For context, Review Efficiency Index (REI) is defined as the number of closed pull requests divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures the efficiency of closing pull requests.

We expect the 3.2 release to merge a lot of new features, but to do that we need people to help us testing them.

Please do join the Product Team as above if you’d like to help with this. You don’t need to be a developer to help with testing new features – we even have a test instance of Mautic for you to use!  Plus, you get to play with the new features before they are released!

In terms of the wider community, when we take into account Github, Slack, the Forums and Meetup we are continuing to see a somewhat stable number of active contributors – not as many as in the early days of Mautic, but definitely higher than we have had over the past few years.

If we look at the rolling average we can also see a big jump at the beginning of the new year (when we did some maintenance in the forums to close old threads) but on the whole, the community is seeing a fairly consistent number of contributors with a slight upward trend.

Conclusion

A huge amount of work has been going on over the last quarter, across all teams in the community. We are continuing to move forward with clearing up our technical debt and welcoming new contributors to all teams.  It is great to see the project starting to manage its own finances and I believe this will be a solid foundation for future growth.

We are looking forward to some exciting projects coming to fruition by the end of the year, including our next minor release which has several great features being introduced. We will also be holding the first World Conference – MautiCon – which is already shaping up to be a great event!

There are many ways to help be a part of making Mautic great, and many people on hand to get you started. If you’d like to be involved, feel free to drop me an email at ruth.cheesley@acquia.com or drop a message in #community in Slack, and we’ll help you get going!

All of this has happened against a backdrop of a worldwide lockdown due to Coronavirus and systemic abuses of power and racism being witnessed in communities around the world.   We stand united in condemning racism, racist behaviour and all abuses of power.  As a relatively new community we have a long way to go, and we are dedicated to setting up the conditions for our community being welcoming and supportive to all.

The lockdown has had different impacts across our community.  Some have found they had more time for contributing due to being furloughed, where others found themselves trying to juggle a full-time job with caring responsibilities and as a result were not able to contribute as much, or in some cases at all. Ultimately, your wellbeing and that of your family has to come first. There will always be tasks to do, code to write, pull requests to test. During these difficult times, take the time to care for those you love, and when you are ready to return, we will be here.

Despite all the challenges we have faced over the last three months, we have made some huge steps forward.

Running our first virtual sprint

As the world suddenly found itself in lockdown last April, the Mautic Community kicked off our first virtual sprint, which was originally planned to be held in Ghent at Drupal Dev Days.  

A huge amount of work went on ‘behind the scenes’ by the Community Leadership Team who helped to organise the two-day event, which saw more than 60 people sign up and 42 contributors joining us during the event.

I was particularly pleased to see several faces from the Drupal and TYPO3 community bringing their knowledge and expertise to work on issues or projects in the Mautic community.

Getting accepted as a Google Season of Docs organisation

In April we applied for the Google Season of Docs, and later heard that we had been accepted!  We will be working with two Technical Writers who will be helping us to improve our documentation – watch out for the announcement when we will share which projects have been successful!

Making some important changes

Appointing a full-time Project Lead

In May, we shared the news that  – with the full support of the Community Leadership Team and DB Hurley – Acquia appointed myself as a full-time project lead.  

After leaving Acquia, DB Hurley scaled back his participation in the Mautic community and felt it was in Mautic’s best interest to have a full-time Project Lead.  He will continue to act as an ambassador for the Mautic project. We are grateful for DB’s leadership and having guided us this far. 

Setting the direction for Mautic

We defined our mission:

“To help people succeed with Mautic”

and our six areas of focus:

We also defined our release strategy and shared the cadence that the community can expect to see in the coming months along with some changes that we are making to approvals of pull requests which will help us meet our goals – read more here.

I enjoyed hosting webinars where we unpacked these changes and answered questions with many of our international communities which you can watch back on our YouTube channel.

Project Lead Office Hours

If you have any questions or would like to chat about anything to do with Mautic, I have also started holding office hours weekly.

Ask product questions, suggest feature requests, lodge complaints, offer praise, share ideas, discuss recent blog posts, or talk about good or bad experiences using Mautic.

Anything that’s on your mind is fair game. I’m here to listen, share, and be available to help in any way I can.

Office Hours with Ruth Cheesley EMEA/Americas – Fortnightly from 28th May at 1500hrs UK time Link to join: https://acquia.zoom.us/j/98583607751 (Password: 815478)

Office Hours with Ruth Cheesley APJ – Fortnightly from 3rd June at 0700hrs UK time Link to join: https://acquia.zoom.us/j/91119231380 (Password: 502111)

Both are on the Mautic Community Calendar.

Launching Mautic 3

Last but by no means least, after over five months of hard work, Mautic 3 was released and we also provided a smooth migration path for Mautic 2 with the upgrade script that ships with Mautic 2.16.3. 

We also shipped the first patch release for Mautic 3, 3.0.1. 

Read more about the Mautic 3 release here.

Code-related metrics

Contributions 

When considering the Mautic product repository (github.com/mautic/mautic) and filtering commits to the core Mautic repository, we can see a blip in May with only 63 commits, which has bounced back to 143 in June.  We know that the spike from Q4 2019-Q1 2020 was largely due to the work on Mautic 3, so we are expecting to see things settle into the coming quarter. 

If we exclude the work done by Acquia staff we can see a strong increase in community contributions to Mautic core this quarter, particularly as we geared up for the Mautic 3 release in June.

Attraction and retention of developers

When considering the core Mautic repository, we can see that there have not been as many new developers during Q2 making their first commits.

We have, however, seen an increase in casual contributors this quarter, defined by:

• Core: those contributing 80% of the activity.
• Regular: those contributing the next 15% of the activity.
• Casual: those contributing the last 5% of the activity.

This indicates less reliance on the core team and more engagement from the wider community.

Issue management efficiency

The efficiency at which we process and close issues has been improving this quarter, due to a continued effort to close outdated issues, merge PR’s and triage more effectively. For reference, Backlog Management Index (BMI), is defined as the number of closed issues divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures our efficiency at closing issues.

The median time to close issues in Q2 is 11.439 days, with the trend continuing to rise (see the trend below) as we are working through closing old issues. This is being addressed by the Product Team with the establishment of a triage team.

Pull request merging efficiency

We have seen several organisations contributing to Mautic over the past quarter, with an expected reduction in volume contributed by Acquia since the Mautic 3 work was completed.

The Product Team is steadily working through the backlog of open pull requests and aims to have all open PR’s tagged to a future release by the end of Q3.  

Progress in this area is largely limited by the need for community testing of pull requests which is an ongoing challenge, and the need for older PR’s to be rebased and updated for Mautic 3.

We are also continuing to work on being more efficient at merging PR’s as demonstrated by a rising REI.  For context, Review Efficiency Index (REI) is defined as the number of closed pull requests divided by the number of open ones in a given period of time. This metric measures the efficiency of closing pull requests.

Growth in overall community engagement

Active community members

We are continuing to see a growth in active community members over time across all our channels (Github, Slack, Forums and Meetup), which is beginning to regularly trend above the average.  This is great to see after several years of decline.

Contributions

Following the work on Mautic 3, we have seen a decline in the total number of contributions across the whole community, returning back to the levels of late 2019.

Compared with last quarter, the trend is increasing upwards and we are remaining above the average line. This is something to monitor over time to ensure that it does not continue to fall.

Web traffic

We are continuing to see an increase in traffic compared with the previous year (across the website, forums and documentation portal).

June 2020 also saw the highest volume of search interest in Mautic since it was launched according to Google Search Trends:

We are continuing to see a gradual rise in position and click-through rate in Google for mautic.org despite the reduced traffic since separating the forums and documentation in August 2019 and March 2020 respectively.

The documentation portal has seen a substantial increase in impressions since May 2020:

As has the forums:

Want to help us improve our web presence?

The Marketing Team is actively recruiting members and would love to hear from you – just join the Slack channel (get an invite at mautic.org/slack).

Conclusion 

There has been a lot happening over the past quarter and a lot of good progress has been made. 

The Mautic 3 release was a huge project and a big milestone for us, but we have many more challenges ahead of us! 

We are starting to address the backlog of technical debt and to grow the community, but we need your help to make that happen. 

The easiest way to get involved is to jump into our Slack community and join the team channels – they all start with #t-.  Teams meet fortnightly on Slack, but just hop in and say hello at any time!

I am looking forward to seeing the project continue to go from strength to strength with the support of this amazing community!