A huge thanks to Acquia’s R&D team for leading this project and doing the vast majority of the heavy lifting, also to the community contributors who have submitted pull requests, bug fixes, and helped with rebasing pull requests from Mautic 2.x (which is an ongoing process).

Many of you have also been involved with testing throughout the alpha and beta release cycles, contributing documentation, and helping us with the launch campaign. Without you, we would not be here making this release today, so thank you very much!

Mautic 3 is predominantly an ‘under the hood’ release which updates several outdated frameworks that Mautic relies upon.

Also, the minimum PHP version required has now been increased from 5.6.19 to 7.2.21, and the minimum MySQL version has been raised from 5.5.3 to 5.7.

These long-awaited improvements are not only important for future security, stability and performance, but also lays the foundation for future development.

We expect our recently defined release strategy to bring some much-requested features and updates, ensuring that Mautic becomes the tool of choice for the digital marketer.

What has changed?

Although there is a lot of change in the codebase with this release (nearly 4,000 files were modified!), there will be little impact to Mautic users in their daily work – you will find the user interface and the feature set largely unchanged.

There are, however, some key changes that administrators of Mautic instances will need to bear in mind:

These changes have been reflected in the documentation, find more information on the Features by major release page.

The most significant changes will impact developers. A full list of deprecations and changes can be found here.

We are in the process of updating the developer documentation to incorporate all of these changes. If you would like to help us with this project, please join the Education team slack channel – get an invite to the Slack instance at mautic.org/slack.

How do I download Mautic 3?

From today when you download from mautic.org/download you will automatically download Mautic 3.0.1.

Note: If you plan to integrate with HubSpot, we have a couple of outstanding bugs which we plan to fix with the 3.0.2 release on 27th July 2020.

How do I update to Mautic 3?

On Monday, 29th June 2020 we released Mautic 2.16.3 stable. This release includes the upgrade script which will allow you to migrate from Mautic 2 to Mautic 3.

If you would like to test the migration script, we strongly recommend that you create a staging site rather than do this directly in your live instance. Take a look at this great blog article which explains how to do this.

As always, ensure that you have a working backup before updating.

Note: If you currently integrate with HubSpot, we have a couple of outstanding bugs which we plan to fix with the 3.0.2 release on 27th July 2020.  Please wait until then if this applies to you.

Running the migration

The upgrade script can be executed in the user interface or at the command line. It has many built-in checks to ensure that your environment is suitable for Mautic 3.  If the script encounters any problems, you will receive an error code with a link that takes you directly to the relevant part of the documentation to learn what happened, and what to do next.

During the upgrade process a backup is made of your file and database structure. You will therefore need at least twice the size of your Mautic instance (files and database) available to run the upgrade.

If you have any third party plugins or custom plugins which you have not updated to support Mautic 3, you will need to move them from the plugins directory to, for example, a new plugins-backup directory before you run the migration.

The script will remind you to do this during the upgrade process. This step is important, if your plugins are not Mautic 3 compatible you may experience errors on completion of the migration making your instance inaccessible.

A big thank you to Dennis Ameling for his work on this migration script!

How do I get help?

If you encounter errors with installing or upgrading to Mautic 3, we have dedicated documentation available, and a forum category for community-powered support.

Please ensure that you use the post template and provide all the required information, as this enables our volunteers to troubleshoot with you more efficiently.

Updated on 29th June 2020 to reflect the stable release of 2.16.3.

What is the status?

Just under two weeks ago we released a second beta for community testing. There had been significant changes as a result of fixed bugs identified from the earlier beta, as well as bringing in the bug fixes from 2.16.1 and 2.16.2, and we felt it was important that it be fully tested before distributing the release.

We have also been working hard on a robust migration script which will allow you to update Mautic via a web-based interface or at the command line, with built-in safety checks and backups.

Where is the release?

The short answer is that we are not ready to make a release today, for the reasons outlined below.

We know that you are all excited to start using Mautic 3, and fully appreciate that delays are frustrating.

We have also had first hand, personal experience of encountering bugs and problems after updating Mautic in the past, which caused major problems.

We are committed to improving the stability of Mautic and ensuring that the process of installing or updating to Mautic 3 is smooth. We do not want to rush out the release when we know that there are outstanding problems that need to be addressed.

You can help us to get the release finalised in several ways, outlined below.

Our revised plan for release is as follows:

Monday June 15th 2020: 3.0.0 release (new installations) + 2.16.3-beta release (adds the upgrade script)

Monday June 29th 2020: 3.0.1 release + 2.16.3 stable release (adds the upgrade script)

Why the delay?

Incomplete user acceptance testing on beta 2 release

Currently the testing process is still ongoing. We have only had two community members working on this, so we still have some way to go until we are confident that we have rigorously tested all areas.

We are in the process of writing automated acceptance tests which will significantly reduce this testing effort in the future.

How can you make a difference?

Can you spare some time to help us test the features and functionality of Mautic?

We have a test environment up at m3.mautibox.com so you only need to know how to use Mautic and follow instructions.

Get started on our UAT Trello board and join #mautic-3 on Slack (get an invite at mautic.org/slack)

Bugs identified in testing the beta 2 release

During the testing of the beta 2 release, we have identified some bugs which we know will impact a large percentage of Mautic users.

These are fixed or are in the process of being fixed, but have not yet been tested.

How can you make a difference?

If you are a developer, take a look at any of the bugs in the ‘to do’ column and if you can fix them, please submit and link a PR.

If you are familiar with Mautic, take a look at the items in the ‘needs testing’ column on the Mautic 3 board – test the bug on the base branch at m3.mautibox.com and the test the fix by selecting the appropriate pull request at m3.mautibox.com. Make sure that you report your findings by clicking on the card, going to ‘files changed’ and leaving a review.

We really appreciate that this is not the best news to be sharing, but we believe that this is the right thing to do for Mautic. We hope that you will consider helping us over the next two weeks, however you are able to do so.

If you’ve provided a Pull Request against the Mautic repository on GitHub, thank you!

As you might have seen, Mautic’s Core Team has been busy working on Mautic 3, which introduces major changes under the hood. At the same time, a large number (200+) of Pull Requests were created against Mautic’s staging branch (2.x).

When Mautic 3 is released (expected soon), we will only be providing bug fixes against the 2.x branch due to it being very far behind on Mautic 3. At the same time, we don’t want your Pull Request to go un-merged. In the end, contributions like yours are what makes Mautic better every day! ?

Therefore, we’d like to ask you to check the following (before you start, please add WIP to the title of your PR so that everyone knows you’re doing something with it):

How do I rebase my PR against Mautic 3?

For this example, you would check out the my-pr branch, and then rebase it onto the 3.x branch as follows:

$ git checkout my-pr 

$ git rebase 3.x

First, rewinding head to replay your work on top of it...

Applying: added staged command

This operation works by going to the common ancestor of the two branches (the one you’re on and the one you’re rebasing onto), getting the diff introduced by each commit of the branch you’re on, saving those diffs to temporary files, resetting the current branch to the same commit as the branch you are rebasing onto, and finally applying each change in turn.

As this process works through commit-by-commit, if your PR has 10 commits, it will rebase each commit separately.

If there is a merge conflict during this process, it will stop and ask you to resolve them.

Once you do, you have to

git add /the/file/with/resolved/conflict.php

and then continue with the rebase with

git rebase --continue

It may happen there will be conflicts in more than one commits, and even in several files in one commit.

At this point, you can go back to the master branch and do a fast-forward merge.

$ git checkout 3.x

$ git merge my-branch

While rebasing is a good process to start with, larger PRs may become somewhat unmanageable, so you can consider using git merge instead, however rebasing gives a much a cleaner git history – merge will create a new commit, whereas rebase alters existing commits.

For further documentation on rebasing please check the Git Documentation. If you need any help please don’t hesitate to ask the Product Team for support via the Slack channel.

How long will it take for my (updated) PR to be processed?

Once you have completed the process, the product team will review your rebased PR within two weeks and will provide any feedback as appropriate. 

They will also determine which release to aim for.

Please keep in mind that there is a large backlog of PRs at the moment, but we try to respond as fast as we can.

Want to help us with this project? Consider getting involved with the Product Team – to get started, please join our Slack channel!

Under-The-Hood Release

Mautic 3 (referred to as “M3”) is the third iteration of the world’s first Open Source Marketing Automation platform.

It brings a complete refurbishment of several key parts of Mautic ‘under the hood’, including major upgrades of the underlying frameworks such as Symfony and jQuery, and also of many more dependencies.

Also, the minimum PHP version will be increased from 5.6.19 to 7.2.21 and the minimum MySQL version will be raised from 5.5.3 to 5.7.

These long-awaited improvements are not only important for future security; stability and performance, but also lays the foundation for Mautic 4. This is expected to bring some much-requested features and changes to ensure Mautic remains the go-to choice for the digital marketer.

Although there will be a lot of changes in the codebase with this release there will be little impact to Mautic users in their daily work – you will find the user interface and the feature set largely unchanged.

Plugin Developers, Get Ready

Mautic 3 will come with “breaking changes” at the code level (mostly due to changes in Symfony) which means that developers will need to update their code to work with Mautic 3.

If you maintain your own Mautic Plugins, themes or integrations, please make sure you review the technical notes and plan to upgrade them accordingly.  Information can be found in the UPGRADE-3.0.0.md file which will ship with the releases.

The good news is: We will see very few significant changes in the database structure and schema, or in the API. 

Question: When is the best time to prepare the upgrade for my Mautic Plugin?

Answer: Right away! Simply work on removing the deprecations listed in the upgrade file, and test against Mautic 2 – that is a fully valid verification.  Once the alpha and beta releases are available you can also test against those.

Administrators, Get Ready

One consistent goal in the development process for Mautic 3 has been a painless, easy upgrade path for existing Mautic installations. 

There are, however, some key changes that administrators of Mautic instances will need to bear in mind when testing (and later, migrating to) Mautic 3:

• {leadfield=…} tokens were removed. Use {contactfield=…} tokens instead.
• The minimum PHP version will be 7.2.21
• The minimum MySQL version will be 5.7
• Console was moved to another directory. Update all your cron jobs and replace app/console with bin/console
• There is a new file manager. You can see it when you go to a WYSIWYG editor and try to add an image for example.
• The Rackspace and OpenStack plugins for remote assets were removed due to outdated library from Rackspace.

As a Mautic administrator, there are a couple of other things to consider:

1. Is there any third-party code (e.g. plugins, themes, customisations) in your installation?
   
   
   
   If so, get in touch with the authors and ask them for an M3-ready version.
   
    
2. Is there any outside software that is talking to your Mautic instance via API (e.g. a CMS integration)?
   
   
   
   If so, ask the vendor to review any M3 changes which might affect the integration, and verify that the integrations will continue to function.
   
    
3. Prepare your test environment!
   
   
   
   You should NOT run the upgrade on the live system that you depend on without first testing the update. So, by all means, create a copy of your Mautic instance now so that you’re ready when the release is made available. Not sure how to do this? We have a blog post coming soon, which will walk you through step-by-step.

You may want to prepare an email to inform your users of the update and telling them of any specific changes that you expect as a result – for example the new WYSIWYG editor, and any updates to third-party integrations or themes.

Mautic 3 Timeline

The following is the proposed timeline*:

Friday, 10th January 2020 – Alpha release of Mautic 3 available for testing
10-17th January 2020 – Testing period for alpha release of Mautic 3

Monday, 20th January 17th February 2020 – Beta release of Mautic 3 available for testing
20th January – 2nd February 17th February – 17th May 2020 – Testing period for beta release of Mautic 3

Monday 18th May 2020 – Beta 2 release of Mautic 3 available for testing
18th – 27th May 2020 – Testing period for beta 2 release of Mautic 3

Wednesday 27th May 2020 – Stable release of Mautic 3

Early releases (alpha and beta) are an important opportunity for the community to help with quality assurance by testing across the wide range of different environments and configurations in use, so please do test as thoroughly as you can (again, on your test area and NOT on your live instance), and provide all the feedback you have!

* Updated 18th May 2020 to reflect expected release date of Mautic 3 stable

Be A Part Of It

Mautic 3 is a collaborative effort by the Mautic Community, at this point, including substantial support by Acquia’s engineering team.

The team is very open to community members getting involved in working on all aspects of the Mautic 3 release (and of course in future releases, too) e.g.

• as a developer (junior or senior),
• by testing individual elements (“PRs”; doesn’t require any coding skills!) or by testing and providing feedback on the alpha/beta release,
• as a designer or marketer (find out about the Marketing Team),
• by updating and improving the documentation (find out about the Education Team),

Getting started is really easy, and the best way to get in touch is always the Slack channels, e.g https://mautic.slack.com/archives/CPVGZE516 (sign up on https://www.mautic.org/slack/).

Credits

Thanks to Ekkehard Gümbel, Alan Hartless, John Linhart, Don Gilbert, Mary Matson for writing and editing the article and providing information about the release.

We are grateful to Floris van Geel who organised Contribution Day, which allowed us to put together the Community Summit at very short notice, and Acquia, who funded the Summit as our sponsor. 

It was really great to be co-located with several other Open Source projects at Contribution Day, and to learn more about what they were working on. Ruth gave a lightning talk about Mautic which was well received, with several comments of “Wow, Mautic is way cooler than I thought it was”!

The Community Summit

We kicked off with an informal standup where we introduced ourselves and talked about how we would organise the day to get the most out of our time together. There were some discussions about what features would be able to be integrated in minor releases of 3.x and what would need to be pushed back to the next major release. We also discussed how to continue with bug fixes while the Symfony work proceeded, to ensure that there weren’t any issues with the code changes being made.

One team focused on the work involved with migrating the Symfony framework, and another team focused on the work needed to begin implementing the Community Governance framework. There were whiteboards, sticky notes and conversations a-plenty!

Mautic 3 

The task to migrate the Symfony framework had already been started by Alan Hartless, and a board prepared with the tasks that needed to be done – https://github.com/orgs/mautic/projects/6. The team set to work right away and we quickly started to see great progress being made! It is a really significant project, with extensive review, removal of deprecated code, re-writing, and then of course the all-important testing and code review!

The work is still ongoing, however the community sprint gave the team a significant jump-start and we are actively welcoming community involvement going forward.

To date, more than half of the tasks are already underway, with 5 completed and 17 pending testing and code review.

How can you get involved after the Summit? 

If you’re a developer familiar with Symfony and Mautic, jump into the project board and pick up an issue which takes your interest. Ensure you read the instructions and follow the steps in the workflow. Ping Alan Hartless on Slack if you need any help.

Not a developer?

All of the work being done needs to be tested thoroughly. Take a look at the ‘needs user tests’ column and find one that you’d like to work on. Read through the instructions and report your findings.

Need some help with getting started in testing? Check out this article on how to get set up with DDEV if you’re already using Docker, and this article on how to test Mautic. Drop Ruth Cheesley or Norman Pracht a line if you need further help.

Community Governance

Implementing the Community Governance Model was the key focus of the other team at the Community Summit. We started with a discussion on the model so that we were all clear on what had been proposed, and then we started to break out what working groups (WG) might be included in each team.

We came to the decision that the proposed structure needed a little tweaking, and landed upon the structure of five teams:

• Marketing Team
  • Newsletter WG
  • Website WG
  • Blog WG
• Community Team
  • Outreach WG
  • Events WG
  • MautiCamps WG
  • MautiCon WG
  • Growth (both local and global)
• Education Team [new]
  • Forums WG
  • Documentation WG
• Product Team
  • Release WG
  • Security WG
  • Roadmap & Features WG
• Legal & Finance Team
  • Finance WG
  • Trademark WG

We also talked about how to initially set up the teams – which will be by appointment rather than election – and how to work the first and ongoing terms so that we don’t lose all the leadership at the same time.

We defined active members of a team or working group as having attended or participated in at least one of the previous three meetings (some might meet fortnightly, others monthly, depending on need) which would enable them to have a vote in the context of that team or working group.

Working Groups will set their own cadence for meetings, but teams will meet a minimum of monthly, and the leaders and assistant team leaders of teams will also have a meeting at least monthly.

Elections will be held after an initial term of six months, with each team being staggered by two months. So, as an example, the first team will have elections at 6 months, the next at 8 months, and so forth.

It was also determined that a leader may put themselves forward for re-election, or step down, at the end of their term. Standing for re-election would not prevent others from stepping forward to be considered for the role.

It was agreed that the information, once confirmed and adopted, would be added to the categories on the forum, to the website, and to the Github repository (probably contributing.md).

We then broke out into smaller groups and started to write up a description of each team, which would explain the function of the team, and the kind of skills that volunteers might be able to contribute.

How can you get involved after the Summit?

It was felt that we needed to finalise this in a follow up call where we invited other community members to give their insights, before adding them to the description of each category on the forums and putting out a call for volunteers.

The call is scheduled for Thursday, 7th November at 1600hrs CET and will use the Jitsi call link: https://meet.jit.si/MauticCommunityCall. Join #Community on Slack to follow the discussions!

You can find the working document here, it is saved in the Mautic Community drive folder.

Was it worth it?

The Community Summit has given us a critical head-start on some fundamental tasks that were facing the project. It also was a great opportunity for face-to-face meeting between contributors, which was hugely valuable!

Here’s some feedback from people who joined us in the summit:

“What a day: We got so much done, plus we now have the foundation for much more going forward – both in organization and in personal relations around the world. A true quantum leap!”

~ Ekkehard Gümbel

I felt inspired and gained a lot of insight working besides the Mautic community even though I was working on my own Drupal issues. I even joined the Mautic community online and felt immediately welcomed as I saw my username immediately listed as a ‘Mautician’.

~ Matthew Radcliffe

It was great to bring together the team from Acquia and the community to get started on what are some huge tasks for the Mautic project! Seeing everybody working together, getting things done and literally creating the foundations for future growth was really inspiring! It was even better to be located with other Open Source projects and hearing what they were working on, sharing our challenges and learning from each other at the same time.

~ Ruth Cheesley

See also write ups from Norman and Ekke on LinkedIn.