We’ve listened to a lot of feedback from across the community and we have decided to slightly adjust our release strategy to better streamline our processes without stifling innovation.

Our goals with this updated release strategy are:

• Predictable releases which are on-time 
• Ensure Mautic is always up to date with releases from our major dependencies
• Rapid release of bug fixes and new features when fully tested and reviewed
• Longer support periods for major versions, with minor releases for 12 months followed by a long period of feature stability

 In summary, we will:

• Move to a 24-month release cycle between major releases, which is aligned with that of Symfony – Mautic’s primary dependency and underlying framework
• Move to time-based releases (from a mix of time and feature based)
• Extend support for each Major version so that it’s supported for at least 18 months
• Continue with monthly patch (bug-fix) releases during the active support period
• Provide one security release each quarter during the active and security support period, where fixes are ready to release (and any urgent out-of-cycle releases as deemed necessary by the Security Team)

Below you will find a detailed explanation of our new release strategy.

Establishing a Long Term Support (LTS) version

To date Mautic has never had an official Long Term Support (LTS) version – we continually shipped feature releases quarterly until a new release was out, and then we stopped supporting the previous version within a matter of months. 

This is painful for businesses with complex installations or agencies supporting large numbers of versions, because:

• They want stability more than continuous change, and 
• They need time to test and update the new Major release for their instances (and sometimes have to wait for third party plugins to be available and mature) however bug fixes are no longer provided for their current versions.

Now, we’re going to ensure that the previous version of Mautic is supported for at least six months after the General Availability release of the next Long Term Support version.

Generally speaking after Mautic 6.0 (which is a special series – more on that later) the Long Term Support version will be the *.3 release of any series, unless there is some unexpected need to issue more minor releases.

For example, Mautic 7.3 will be the LTS release in the 7.x series, and that will receive bug fix updates through until the end of 2026 when it will then receive security fixes for another year.

This means that going forward each release series will eventually be actively supported for at least three years from the General Availability release, when you consider active support and security support.

Establishing an Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) program

Following debate within the community, an Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) program is being developed which aims to launch in Q1 2025. This will see us offering a paid service which provides subscribers with security fixes for an additional period of two years (paid in annual subscriptions) from the end of security support, after which that release series reaches End of Life.

The ELTS will be an annual subscription which is paid at the beginning of the calendar year for the following 12 months, on a per-instance basis. More details on this will be released by the ELTS working group in due course.

Establishing a clearly defined release cadence

In the past we had aimed to release at the end of the month on the last Monday, but recently this has become more sporadic as we fell into the trap of trying to get specific features or bug fixes merged into a release, resulting in delays. 

Now, we’re going to move to a strictly time-based release process. Whatever is ready, tested, documented and merged on release day will be included in the release. Everything else will have to wait for a later release. The Product Team will continue to have a bounties fund which they can use to incentivize fixing specific bugs which need to be addressed and where there isn’t existing interest.

Major releases have a clearly documented Alpha, Beta and Release Candidate feature freeze – if features are not ready, they will not be considered for that release. Minor releases will have a Release Candidate freeze the month prior to release and no further features will be considered after this date.

We will also ensure that the second release in a quarter is a security release where there are security fixes ready to be released. This gives Mautic users more clarity on when to expect these fixes to come over, and also means the security team are primed with clear dates in mind to get their work deployed to Mautic users.

Catching up with Symfony releases

Since Mautic 3 we’ve been playing catch up with Symfony releases, which has meant that Mautic has only just managed to deploy a new version before security support ends for a series of Symfony releases. This is quite painful for larger businesses who require their software to be running on actively supported versions, and it also puts a great deal of pressure on the Product Team to cram a lot of changes into a release with very tight deadlines.

We are planning to address this in a couple of ways:

1. We will make Mautic 6.0 – which supports Symfony 6.x – a ‘bridging release’ which will only be supported for 21 months from the General Availability release, plus one year of ELTS support rather than two.
    
   • Mautic 6.0 General Availability will be released in Q1 2025
      
   • This will be the LTS version of Mautic 6.x – there won’t be any other feature releases in this series, only patch releases
      
   •  Mautic 6.x will become End of Life after 12 months of ELTS support, in October 2027, with Symfony 6.x being End of Life in November 2027.
      
2. After 6.0 is released, all future features will be on the 7.x branch
   • Mautic 7.x will support Symfony 7.x 
   • Mautic 7.3 will be the LTS version
   • Security support ends at the end of 2027

ELTS support will extend until the end of 2029, when both Mautic 7 and Symfony 7 will reach end of life.

Sponsored releases

The biggest blocker for Mautic’s ability to sustain its progress is having the resources to lead and support releases.

Going forward, we will have the option for companies and organizations to sponsor a release, which means their logos and links will be prominently linked on the release notes and the website, along with all communications associated with the release.

In exchange, they can either fund or provide in kind the services of a developer who will work with the release team, moving that release through from planning to deployment.

Conclusion

To wrap up, we’re really looking forward to implementing this new release strategy to better serve our community. By moving towards a 24-month release cycle, focusing on time-based releases and extending support for each major version, we’re taking steps towards a more predictable, stable future for Mautic from which all benefit.

The introduction of an official Long Term Support (LTS) version and providing a paid-for Extended Long Term Support (ELTS) program demonstrates our commitment to providing greater stability for those users who require it, without sacrificing innovation.

By catching up and keeping pace with Symfony releases, we can ensure we’re always providing the latest technology and features while removing technical debt, ensuring Mautic is using the latest versions of the secure and modern framework on which we depend.

We’re confident that these changes will help to streamline our processes, enhance our product and inspire future growth and innovation. This is an exciting new chapter in Mautic’s journey and we’re looking forward to embarking on this journey together with our community. Here’s to a bright future for Mautic!

We have heard your feedback and have decided to revamp the way we organize resources in Mautic. Our main objective is to make it easier for users like you to quickly find and collate resources related to a specific context — such as a project or a marketing campaign.

Our existing tagging interface and categorizing system have served us well, but we acknowledge that there is room for improvement. That’s why we are taking a fresh look at our categorization system to truly cater to your needs.

What’s Changing?

Over the next few months, we will undertake a transformative project that will introduce some key changes to the Mautic platform:

1. Global-Based Categories: We are moving away from entity-based categories (for instance, categories exclusive to emails, or pages) to incorporate global-based categories. This shift to a more inclusive categorizing system will provide you with greater flexibility and control over your resources (and hopefully be less confusing!)
    
2. Multiple Categories Per Entity: With this feature enhancement, you will be able to assign more than one category to a resource. This enhancement will increase the system’s versatility and allow you to better manage crossover resources – like assets which belong to multiple projects or marketing campaigns, for example.
    
3. Category Nesting: This feature will give you the power to nest categories within each other, further enhancing the tool’s organization capabilities.
    
4. Front-End View: Finally, we will introduce a new front-end view that displays the entities and sub-categories within a category in a user-friendly, intuitive layout.

We are also considering adding features in future updates, such as an archived state to remove and unpublish resources – helping to reduce server load – and offering rolled-up reporting by category.

This initiative will evolve iteratively over several months. You can track the progress at our project’s roadmap page.

Participate in Mautic’s Evolution

For those interested, we have laid out the upcoming changes in the project brief where you can also quickly find any meeting notes relating to this project. 

Issues will be created on Github in the coming weeks for developers to work on. We have also initiated a bounty fund currently sitting at $1000 for the whole initiative. You can contribute to this cause here. If you are a developer and interested in contributing, you can learn more about contributing to Mautic here, and working with the bounty programme here.

We Want to Hear from You

Your insights and feedback are what drives Mautic’s growth. As we embark on this exciting new initiative, we value your thoughts, ideas, and solutions. Please share them with us at each stage of the process, as they could potentially influence our development roadmap.

Finally, thank you for being part of the Mautic community! With your continued support and contributions, we strongly believe we can make Mautic an even better, more intuitive, and efficient platform for all users.

Over the last year the Install and Upgrade Initiative team have been working closely with the Product Team on investigating how to bring more stability to the installation and upgrade process of Mautic. We are now beginning to introduce some changes with the ultimate goal of having a rock-solid, stable install and upgrade workflow for Mautic which works as well for single Mautic instances as for managing Mautic at scale.

Coming soon

Deprecating current installation and upgrade methods

Since Mautic 2.0 we have been advising Mautic users to update at the command line, now we are going to make it a requirement.

With the 4.2.0 release of Mautic, you will start to see warnings if you are using the update feature within Mautic itself (often referred to as ‘in the user interface’ [UI]), telling you that this has been deprecated and will be completely removed in Mautic 5. 

The reason for this will be evident to anybody who has tried to use the update feature within Mautic with anything other than a test installation – during the update process, a lot of intensive tasks have to be executed which can take quite some time with a large number of contacts. This will often cause the process running on the server to be terminated due to the hosting environment being incapable of completing the tasks with the available resources. This is the number one issue where updates fail and cause Mautic to crash, leaving users extremely frustrated.

From Mautic 5, you will no longer be able to update Mautic from within the user interface, and will have to update following specific commands at the command line.

We do appreciate that for some users of Mautic, this adds an extra layer of complexity, however we believe that the benefits outweigh the many difficulties that users of Mautic experience when attempting updating within the user interface.

Improving in-app guidance to users on how to update

While we will be removing the ability to update in the user interface, we will still be alerting users when a new version of Mautic is available. There will be detailed information provided if their environment doesn’t support updating (for example if a higher version of PHP is required or plugins need to be updated), and a clear overview of what is included in the new version of Mautic.

We will be providing easy to follow, step-by-step instructions for users to follow at the command line in order to update their Mautic instance.

Composer as the supported method for installing and updating Mautic and third party plugins

Since Mautic 4.0 it has been possible to fully manage Mautic with Composer thanks to the work of the Composer Initiative, which brings Mautic in line with many other PHP applications who already use this technology for installing and updating software.

With the introduction of Composer 2, the process is even more efficient and robust, and many Mautic users have reported great success in using Composer to manage their Mautic installations.

With the removal of the UI-based upgrade in Mautic 5, we will also be switching to using Composer as the official way to install and update Mautic. This also has the added benefit of unlocking the ability to manage plugins within the Mautic Marketplace, which is dependent on Composer.

From Mautic 4.2 there is a new setting which you can enable to tell Mautic that you are managing it through Composer, which will disable the built-in updating system, and enable you to manage plugins within the Marketplace.  With this setting enabled, users will see a message warning them that they are not able to update in the user interface.

Improving documentation

With the changes above we recognize the need to improve the documentation we have available, both within the application (as mentioned above) but also in the end-user and developer documentation.

The end-user and developer documentation are currently undergoing a review, update and re-platform to Read the Docs which will enable us to maintain versioned documentation related to different Mautic versions, and to translate the documentation into other languages using Transifex. We would welcome contributors who would like to help with this task, even if you only have a small amount of time – we have lots of small tasks that need to be done. Please join us in #t-education on Slack if you would like to get involved!

We will also be greatly extending the articles we have in our Knowledgebase and moving to a more effective platform, which will enable community members to submit new articles for review, and also provide a much more intuitive experience. We hope that this will include regularly updated tutorials on how to install Mautic on all the popular hosting platforms, and the development of one-click installers.

Future plans

Automatic updates

With the changes above, we are planning in the future to enable automatic updates as a feature which can be enabled by an administrator. Bug fix releases are generally safe to update automatically as they do not include any major changes, new features or significant variations of existing features.

This will not be an option until at least Mautic 5.0, and even then, will require a Composer-managed installation due to the underlying functionality required.

Decoupling plugins and enabling selection during installation

With the changes we are making and the introduction of the Mautic Marketplace, we are planning to fully decouple plugins and integrations from the core of Mautic.

This means that when you install Mautic, you will start with the absolute basics which are required for Mautic to operate – making Mautic installations very streamlined by only including the features that you specifically need for your instance.

During the installation process, the user will be given the opportunity to select other features, functionality or integrations that might be helpful, and to install them. For example, you might want to install the plugin to integrate with your CRM system, or to use a specific third party email provider.

We have started the work on this already by separating the individual plugins out into their own repositories as part of the Composer Initiative, which are currently acting as read-only ‘mirror’ repositories.

The next steps will be to fully isolate each plugin by removing any inter-dependencies, and then to develop the experience within the installation process to include core plugins which are required, and enable the user to select from the marketplace any third party plugins they might need.

Conclusion

I’m pleased to see that we’re starting to make some headway in addressing some of the fundamental problems that people experience when they are installing and updating Mautic, and am looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our future plans for Mautic. Please do reply in the companion forum thread if you have any comments!

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

Today we are sharing the first iterations of our plans for the future which I first shared 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.

Release themes

Back in 2021 we shared that we plan to have a theme for each minor release cycle, to help us with prioritizing specific areas of Mautic to improve.

Without further ado, here are the themes we are focusing on for the upcoming releases:

If you have any questions about the release themes, please first read this post on the blog which explains how they work.

Upcoming features

Below are some of the features we are expecting to be releasing, and a rough timeline for when it is expected that they will come to the community for testing and review:

Improvements to the install/upgrade process

One of the main recurring problems we see in the forums are related to the installation and upgrade of Mautic.

With this Strategic Initiative we have introduced several new checks to prevent users from installing and upgrading Mautic where the environment does not support it due to outdated PHP or MySQL versions. This will be further developed to add extra checks, such as ensuring that the file and folder permissions are correct, and to ensure that the correct PHP modules are enabled.

In addition to this, we will be formally deprecating the ability to update Mautic in the user interface in Mautic 4.2 and removing it completely in Mautic 5. Users will still be alerted to new versions if their instance is out of date, and will be given clear instructions on how to apply the update.

We are also considering implementing automated updates for bug fix releases in the future, but this will require some community consultation and would not be considered for implementation until Mautic 5 at the earliest.

Read more about this in the dedicated blog post.

Fully functional Mautic Marketplace

With the 4.2 release of Mautic, we are implementing the ability to install, remove and search for plugins and integrations from within your Mautic instance. Currently there is a read-only preview available, but the work is almost complete to deliver the next phase of this project.

To start, we will be offering a list of plugins which the core team have reviewed and approved. Read more about this in the dedicated blog post.

Improvements to the Preference Center

Since GDPR has been introduced, the preference center is an important matter for marketers to ensure compliance and provide a helpful experience for their customers.

The current preference center presents a few limitations:

• The configuration of slots, and setting up the preference center in general, can be confusing, 
• An “unsubscribe from all” button (which is required by GDPR) is not available by default,
• There is no setting to make a default Preference Center which can be used as a fall-back in case one is not specified in the emails themselves,
• Using segments to handle subscriptions can be confusing, and in some other marketing automation tools the segments themselves are physically separated from the lists to which a user subscribes, which could be a better user experience for the marketer, and the end-user.

Webmecanik has been working on some of these challenges, and have contributed a solution which will address the first three points (see the ready to test Pull Request).
 

1. Redesign of the preference center settings. Specifically, splitting the configuration into two modes: with or without a Preference Center enabled. This makes it very clear to the marketer whether they are using a Preference Center or a direct unsubscribe user experience, and also shows only the relevant options.
2. When a Preference Center is enabled, a new slot has been added to provide an “unsubscribe all one-click action” and a configuration to customize the text of this one-click link.
3. The Channel and Frequency slots have been separated into two distinct configurations, enabling the marketer to show one or the other, or both, as they prefer
4. Add the option to provide a title for channel and frequency slots

Transactional/Operational Email improvements

There has been a lot of feedback from marketers using Mautic regarding the lack of separation between how operational messages must be delivered to the customer regardless of whether they have opted out, and other communications such as newsletters and marketing messages which must respect the opt-out preferences.

According to best practice, emails which are sent on an individual basis to a single person and not in bulk (such as order confirmation emails, password reset requests and 121 personal communications), should be treated differently to those which are sent in bulk, but Mautic does not provide any way to do this.

During the second half of 2022, Acquia will be working on this, and contributing this back to the community.

Read more in the project brief here.

A/B testing improvements

There are several features missing from our current A/B testing functionality, including being able to automate the post-test actions based on the winner of the test.

This has been blocked by a lot of the pull requests in our backlog, which we are diligently working through to enable Acquia to contribute several exciting new enhancements to this much-used feature.

This is expected at the end of Q2.

A/B testing in campaigns

Another much-requested feature is to be able to run A/B tests within campaigns, allowing the marketer to test which routes are the most beneficial and then take that route.

This is something which is being worked on toward the end of 2022 at Acquia and will be shared with the community soon thereafter.

Multi-table management (Custom Objects plugin)

Acquia is in the process of releasing their Custom Objects plugin under an open source license, which will be available at the end of Q1 2022 as a standalone third-party plugin. 

This allows users to create more many-to-many relational data tables to associate more items, such as products, orders or transactions, households, and more, with either a single contact or multiple contacts. 

For example, one family can have multiple cars from multiple manufacturers or with different models. This elaborates a 1:many relationship between the custom object (car) and the custom items (BMW, Porsche, etc).

You can read more about the plugin here: https://docs.acquia.com/campaign-studio/settings/custom-objects/

ReCAPTCHA v3 plugin for forms and email clicks

The marketer using marketing automation software often faces two major challenges:

• Email statistics are becoming less precise, especially due to new policies from key technology providers (Apple privacy, anti spam software in companies, etc.)
• Spam/bots taking action on forms and in emails which also distort the marketer analysis

Stating this, we wanted to find a way to reduce the spam and bot influence in order to lower its impact on forms and email (and tracked links in general) statistics.

Already there has been a lot of great work done by Konstantin in this third party plugin: https://github.com/KonstantinCodes/mautic-recaptcha to add the Google reCAPTCHA v2 technology on Mautic forms.

On October 29th, 2018, Google introduced the new version of Google reCAPTCHA (v3). This new version brings two important updates:
 

• Can be used to catch bots on links
• Needs less user interaction (no need to click on bikes or buses in a little box) and more magic

Webmecanik has been working on the maintenance of this third party plugin for a long time and introduced support for the v3 features. They are taking on the ongoing maintenance of the plugin, which will also be open to community PRs.

Text messages enhancements

SMS is an important part of multi-channel communication, with 3.8 billion people owning a smartphone in 2021 and 75% of customers wanting to receive offers via SMS.₁

The clickthrough rate for offer messages can be nearly 10% higher compared with other channels, and it is reported that the opening rate for SMS messages can be as high as 98%, with 60% of Americans redeeming coupons via mobile phones.

It’s definitely a channel you can’t afford to overlook!

In Mautic, Webmecanik has been focusing on revitalizing this channel by bringing several enhancements, including:
 

• Adding a character count (released in 4.1.0) knowing that the marketer pays for the SMS depending on the amount of characters,
• Add more stats to text messages (ready to test) by bringing delivery and bounce information,
• Send SMS with custom content, similar to the “send email” action from a contact profile for a quickly sent SMS,
• Add support for tokens for SMS message (ready to test) to help the marketer to introduce personalized information into SMS messages.

Improved reporting and analytics

Another area of Mautic where we have a lot of feedback from Marketers is the reporting and analytics.

While the current system is quite powerful, it often does not deliver the experience that the marketer expects, and can be confusing to work with.

At the end of 2022 and into 2023, we want to take a look at the options available to us for improving this experience for the marketer. We will be forming a working group to focus on this area, and would welcome interest from companies and individuals who would like to get involved with this project.

Project and archive system for organizing Mautic resources

This project got underway in 2021, and we have a full walkthrough of the user experience for organizing resources into projects which I featured in my keynote presentation at Mautic Conference Europe 2021.

We now need to build a team of developers to work on implementing the features of this project, which will be extremely helpful for the marketers who use Mautic on a daily basis.

If you’re interested in getting involved with this project, please join us in #i-resource-management on Slack. We’re hoping that we will be able to deliver this project in 2022, but it may roll into 2023 depending on availability of developers to work on it.

New Strategic Initiatives

Campaign library

At Mautic Conference Europe I also shared a new initiative which we will be working on this year, called the Campaign Library initiative. This initiative will bring the power of exporting campaigns and associated resources to Mautic, and will involve building a library within Mautic where users can view and use pre-built campaigns provided by the community or by their hosting provider.

This is one of the oldest requests in our ideas forum, and one of the most useful features we could implement for marketers who are new to Mautic, enabling them to get a head-start on using best practices for the most common campaigns that we use.

This year we will be scoping this project and breaking it down into smaller deliverable chunks which we can work on. It’s likely that this project will reach into 2023, as it’s quite a significant undertaking, but one which I am sure you will agree, would bring an immense amount of value to the Mautic project.

If you would like to contribute to this initiative, please join #i-campaign-library on Slack.

Promote Mautic

One of the clearest outcomes from the Community Survey we ran last summer was that we need to raise awareness of Mautic both within open source circles and within the wider marketing industry. 

This will help to drive interest in Mautic and the SaaS offerings that many of our partners provide, but also will help us to attract more interest from contributors and drive growth in our ecosystem.

Furthermore, with Mautic becoming more widely known and used, this will also help to drive more traction in the talent market as Mautic becomes a tool that both marketers and developers can see is valuable to work with.

Over the coming year we will be working on several projects under this initiative, some of which are already underway, including creating a pitch deck which we started during the Community Sprint at Mautic Conference Europe.

If you would like to contribute to this initiative, please join #t-marketing and #i-promote-mautic on Slack.

Year of the Contributor

Another very clear point raised in the Community Survey was that people don’t know how to contribute to Mautic, or they don’t feel that their skills can be of use in the community. This is something that we’re going to really be focusing on improving over the coming year, with this initiative focusing on improving the contributor experience.

While we’ve already made some huge steps in improving the contributor experience with our updated Community Handbook onboarding documentation and implementing new features including Gitpod support, which allows one-click installs of Mautic to test new bug fixes and features, there’s a lot more that we can do.

This initiative is going to tackle bringing more contributors into Mautic, improving the experience of contributors as they join our community, and also ensuring that we are retaining our contributors in the longer term.

If you would like to help with this initiative please join #i-yotc on Slack.

Conclusion

We hope that this is a helpful idea of the features we have coming over the next year. As outlined in the opening paragraphs, this is our first time creating such a roadmap and we fully expect there to be some tweaking as we move forward.

[1]  https://techjury.net/blog/sms-marketing-statistics