In this article, Miroslav briefly describes how he started contributing to the community and some of the improvements he was a part of. He also tells a little about the benefits of joining the community.

Why Mautic?

As a PHP software developer, Miroslav had worked as a freelancer and for a few companies before joining the Acquia team two years ago. Acquia provides a marketing and content platform that uses Mautic, among other technologies. The company’s collaborators, like Miroslav, also contribute to the Mautic community, benefiting both the enterprise and the open source project.

Automated tests and then some

Since he has been with the Mautic community, the Czech developer has been working a little with many different features. “I haven’t worked on a specific feature mainly. I improved several areas a bit”, he sums up.

Some of his most prolific contributions regard improvements to automated tests and continuous integrations, which extend to the Mautic 4.2 release of February 2022. Miroslav also lends a hand with general bug fixes, like “campaign jump events occurring twice, support for MySQL full-text search, and custom field order on a contact’s page”, he recalls.

What is good and what is best?

Having the experience to work both with his company’s colleagues and with Mautic’s contributors, Miroslav highlights that contributing to an open source project “is a great way to share your experience and it’s an opportunity to learn something new”.

His favourite part about the Mautic community are the in-person Mautic conferences. “For me it is a great opportunity to get to know other members of the community in a natural and informal way. Listening to lectures is also very helpful, so I as a developer can think about use cases I hadn’t had an idea of before.”

Miroslav’s experience with the Mautic community reflects his personal goals in life. “I want to keep learning new things, working on interesting projects and spending as much spare time as possible with my awesome family.”

If you want to know more about software development and Miroslav Fedeleš, you can check out his GitHub repo, @fedys.

Want to join the Mautic community? Check out our Community and Get Involved sections.

We’re excited to share that there has been a number of improvements to existing integrations and features, as well as new features and integrations that have been added in the 2.9.0 release of Mautic.

Integrations:

Systems Connectivity:

• Zapier: A new integration with Zapier has been created which is available through the Zapier interface. This integration allows a you to create workflows in Zapier based on data from Mautic. These workflows can be triggered based on form submission data, email open data, page hit data, point change data and contact creation or updated data. So many opportunities to provide information across your organization, making each customer experience more relevant and valuable.
• Connectwise: Similarly, a bi-directional sync with Connectwise is now available as a standard plugin. Leads can be created in Connectwise from form or campaign actions in Mautic. Data from Connectwise can be brought back to the contact and company records in Mautic. There is also a full sync option available where any changes made or new contacts created in Mautic can be pushed to Connectwise on a periodic basis.

CRM:

• • CRM Integrations: With this release we are announcing a number of standard CRM plugins to Mautic. With each one of these plugins, a bi-directional sync is standard. Leads can be created in each of these CRM’s from form or campaign actions in Mautic. Data from the CRM’s can be brought back to the contact and company records in Mautic as well. There is also a full sync option available where any changes made in Mautic can be pushed to the CRM’s on a periodic basis. (NOTE: Although each plugin exhibits similar functionality, each will require unique configuration, so be on the lookout for further instruction.) These CRM’s include:
    • SugarCRM (v6.x and v7.x will be supported.)
    • Zoho
    • MS Dynamics
    • PipeDrive

• Salesforce optimization: Along with these standard CRM plugins, the Salesforce plugin has been refactored for performance improvements and scalability. We have also fixed the issue where boolean fields did not sync properly in some cases.

In addition to the exciting integration updates, there has also been work done on one of the most powerful aspects of Mautic, reporting. We all recognize that the ability to review the information that is being gathered is critical to the success of any given effort. These new filters and bug fixes will equip you with better data, making engagement with your audiences more effective.

Reporting

• Reporting filters: You can now specify And/Or conditions at the same level between multiple filters on a report. Additional operators have also been added – these include:
  • contains (e.g you can have a filter of last name contains “lbe” to pull in all contacts that match %lbe%)
  • starts with (e.g. you can have a filter of last name starts with “Gil” to pull in all contacts that match Gil%)
  • ends with (e.g. you can have a filter of last name ends with “bert” to pull in all contacts that match %bert)
• Device filters: You can now create segments based on what device type, brand, OS and model the contact has accessed a marketing communication from.
• Metric alignment: A number of issues regarding report inconsistencies in different areas of the product specifically around emails have been resolved.

Functionality

• Focus Items Formatting: You can now format the content for focus items! A new section called ‘content’ has been added to the builder for focus items that enables you to format content in basic, editor or html mode. This opens the door for even more creativity when engaging visitors to your site.

Infrastructure And Performance

• List upload speed improvement: The list upload speed has been significantly improved. Lists now take ⅙ of the time they did before this enhancement – meaning, if a file took 60 seconds to upload it now takes 10! From a UI perspective, for fields with more than 1000 records, the import process will now run in the background and notify you when complete. It will automatically switch to this background process for files that have over 1000 records so that you are free to leave the page and work in other areas of Mautic. Now there’s even more time to accomplish what you set out to do.

We’re grateful for the those of you who made the effort to load the beta release of 2.9.0 and test the variety of features, functionality and fixes that were part of this release. Mautic would not be where it is today without the incredible community that we have.

For more detailed information on this release, you can find the release notes here. If you have any questions, please be sure to reach out to us via the Community Forums, Slack or our social channels (Facebook & Twitter) and we will do our best to help.

Links to Tutorial Videos

• SugarCRM Integration Setup
• Microsoft Dynamics Integration Setup
• Pipedrive Integration Setup
• Zapier Integration Setup

For all industries and business segments that want to use personal data to enhance their own customer experiences, it’s important to remember that customers are willing to share their information if they know you are using it to help them get what they want… (Source)

The responsibility is on us, as organizations to provide value with the exchange of data. We must assure our customers that we not only see them, but we know about them; and there is a significant difference. It’s critical that we seek to understand their specific needs at every step of the buying journey, from desktop to mobile and everywhere in between.

No matter what innovations businesses set in front of consumers, and no matter how they try to serve them, customer expectations will accelerate. (Source)

In the latest release, you will not only have access to more powerful information, but you can create a more connected, value-driven experience. From integrations to more effective communication tools, you will be able to know more about your audience, not simply know them.

Integrations:

• Workflow Integrations: There are 4 new plugins to integrate data from Citrix into Mautic. These include GoToMeeting, GoToWebinar, GoToAssist and GoToTraining. You can now automatically create contacts in Mautic when individuals register for your events in the Citrix tools from form data in Mautic. In addition, you can pull registrant and attendee data back from the Citrix tools into Mautic and trigger campaigns based on this information. The registration and attendance data is also stored as part of the contact’s timeline in Mautic, giving you more information at a glance.
• Data Enhancement: Data enhancement tools like FullContact and ClearBit can now be integrated with Mautic. Users of these services can enhance their contact and company data in Mautic by clicking buttons on the contact (or company) and bringing data in from those services.
• Accounts Integration: Data from Salesforce Accounts can now be synched with Companies in Mautic. In addition we have optimized the API to minimize the number of API calls Mautic makes. Data from a new field type – formula fields – is also now available for mapping data between Salesforce and Mautic. Lastly Salesforce users can now access the timeline for the contact in Mautic by clicking on a link on the page in Salesforce.

Campaign Management:

• Preference Center: You can now collect preferences for your contacts in Mautic including preferred channels, categories, timings and segments. This will help you manage delivery of more relevant messages, using channels the contact prefers.
• Account Based Marketing Update: We have added a number of new features to Account Based Marketing. Companies in Mautic can now be merged; you now easily change the primary company on a contact; and you can apply a lead score at the company level. These features are in addition to a new set of reports that are available to measure performance at the company level.
• Global Categories: You can specify global categories across emails, landing pages, stages etc to categorize groups of entities in Mautic. You no longer need to define categories individually for each entity in Mautic, helping you stay organized and save you time.
• Email/Landing Page Builder: We’ve created an all new view for those who want to go under the hood and adjust HTML when developing emails and landing pages. The Content tab has been replaced with the new Code Mode view. This view will provide users with 2 panes in the Builder, one to edit the HTML directly and another to preview. Simply select Code Mode to start building, or to convert your existing communications into this view.

Each of these enhancements is another step toward smarter marketing. But with these tools come a greater responsibility to not only know our audience, but know their preferences and their needs as well.

The Mautic 2.3 update has been made available to our Mautic Cloud and Self-hosted users. For more detailed information on this release, you can find the release notes here. If you have any questions, please be sure to reach out to us via the Community Forums, Slack or our social channels (Facebook & Twitter) and we will do our best to help.