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.

Who can use the Mautic Marketplace?

The Mautic Marketplace is enabled by default in browse mode but the install, update and removal of plugins is only available if you manage your Mautic instance using Composer. This is due to the underlying architecture of Mautic and the plugin updating process being incompatible with the current, outdated update methods.

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 web-based updating system and enable you to manage plugins within the Marketplace.

We have provided step-by-step instructions on how to switch to using Composer if you’re not currently managing Mautic this way, in case you would like to switch to using this method – read more in the documentation here. From Mautic 5, the current updating methods will be removed and Composer will be the default way of managing installation and upgrades of Mautic – read more in this blog post.

How to use the Mautic Marketplace

From Mautic 4.2 there is a setting in the Global Configuration which allows you to selectively tell Mautic that you’re using Composer to manage your installation, which will allow you to install and remove plugins through the Mautic Marketplace.    It will also block updates in the user interface.

Please read the guidelines here.

Using the Mautic Marketplace in the User Interface

When the setting above has been enabled, you will be able to manage plugins with the Mautic Marketplace, and a notice will be displayed with a link to the documentation.

Once you have enabled the setting you will be able to search the marketplace using the filter, and install plugins by selecting the option from the dropdown item pictured above.

If you haven’t correctly set the Composer setting, you will see a warning that the Mautic Marketplace is available in read-only mode as below, with a link which explains how to transition to a Composer-managed installation.

How to get my plugin listed on the Mautic Marketplace

We are in the process of moving our developer documentation to a new platform, please find the instructions on how to prepare your plugin for inclusion in the marketplace and how to submit your plugin for review here.

We have learned a lot and as a result, we are implementing a new approach to how we manage bringing new features into Mautic. Some aspects of this are based on the model used by the OBS open source project.

What are we implementing?

We are creating a workflow where community members can propose and discuss new features they would like to see in Mautic and have those ideas reviewed by the Product Team, proposed as a project to be incorporated into the roadmap, funded (where required), and eventually be released as a new feature.

This process will not impact developers who create new features and share them through a pull request for consideration by the community – that is still very much welcomed!

What is the new process?

If you have an idea for how to improve Mautic, the first step is to share your idea in the Ideas & Feature Requests forum category. Please use the post template to fully explain what the idea or feature is, who it would benefit, and why you think it should be considered. Please also state if you’re willing to help working on it.

We use the forums because this is a place where users of Mautic tend to frequently visit, in addition to business owners and developers. Having these discussions in a place which is accessible to all stakeholders is important – everybody needs to have the opportunity to get involved!

Once ideas have been discussed on the forums and accrued enough votes (suggesting community support for the particular feature being proposed), they will be considered by the Product Team during quarterly meetings with the Project Lead, and where appropriate, accepted to be included on the roadmap. This may be as a feature, but sometimes features proposed by the community may also be considered for becoming Strategic Initiatives.

The Product Team will work with the originator of the idea to put together a Request for Proposals (RFP). The Product Team will determine how much of their budget will be allocated to the project and whether any further funds will need to be raised in order to compensate contributors for their time working on the project.

Once the RFP has been finalised, it will be published on the GitHub project under the Discussions section.

If the funds have been secured it will be immediately set to the status of Accepting Proposals with the label of ‘Bounty’ to indicate that it is a funded project, if additional funding needs to be raised this will be achieved through a project on the Mautic Open Collective and the RFP will be set to Fundraising. See an example below of this in action:

Proposals can be made either by individuals or teams of developers working together or as a company, but the final payout will be made to only one stakeholder who would distribute the funds if more than one person contributes toward delivering the project. All individuals and organisations will remain responsible for managing their own tax concerns in their locality and this does not constitute a contract of employment.

See an example of an RFP in progress with the OBS project here: https://github.com/obsproject/obs-studio/discussions/5078.

Sometimes it may be necessary after opening the RFP to raise more funds if a proposal favoured by the Product Team requires in excess of the funds that are currently available – this will be done through a tier on the Open Collective and the RFP will be set to Fundraising until the full amount has been raised.

The Product Team may also decide to use an RFP for particularly large bug fixes or problems which need to be addressed promptly but need to have a detailed interaction with the developer proposing to address the issue, allowing them to clearly outline what is required in the project. Examples of this include fixing and updating the Twitter integration.

As with bounties, there is no compromise on quality – pull requests for new features must meet all the usual requirements of code coverage, review by the Core Team and testing in the community before they will be considered as delivered and ready to be incorporated into the next feature release of Mautic.

The full workflow of how an idea becomes an RFP and eventually a new feature in Mautic can be found in the Community Handbook. We will continue to review and refine this process as we start to include more projects, and look forward to welcoming developers to work on these projects.

When it comes to rolling up our sleeves and getting to the business of marketing, we certainly know how to execute. We are trained to ask probing questions to understand our audience, where they are in the buying journey and capturing their attention. This is now becoming true of marketing automation.

“What does the data say?”
“What were the results of the A/B test?”
“Did our content strategy work in the last campaign?”

The list goes on. While we are becoming great inquisitors, are we truly solving for the big why? When we consider marketing automation and its role in our business, we should first reflect on it’s purpose. It’s only then that we can fully tap into it’s full potential, lest we relegate it to an auto email responder.

We believe that marketing automation should be more than a bolt on solution. It should be an integrated part of your overall business strategy. Our latest release continues to equip your business with the tools you need to bring that strategy to life.

Enhancements

• Mail is Owner: Emails can now be sent from different senders who are owners of the contact, creating a more personalized experience for your audience. This means if a sales rep is the contact owner, a single email send can appear as though it came from that individual.
• Tweet Entity: Not all tweets are created equal. Recognizing the vital role of social media, it would be simple to create a generic interaction via Twitter. However this doesn’t support an integrated way of thinking. A new channel called ‘tweet’ is available to create tweets to send as part of campaigns. Unique tweets can be created, modified and managed from this new channel.
• Campaign Reporting: Channel and component reports can now be filtered for a campaign. A column called campaign has been added to email asset, landing page and form reports to enable the user to analyze these in the context of a campaign. Powerful flexibility that gives you greater clarity in your marketing.
• Custom Fields: Customizing Mautic to meet the needs of your business is important. And measuring them is even more important. Now you can include your custom fields into your reports giving you more valuable insights.
• Summary Columns: But it doesn’t stop there. Now you can summarize data in reports using the “group by” feature and calculated fields. What does this mean? This enables the user to create relevant summaries for your detailed reports.
• Editor Enhancements: The editor continues to grow. We’ve added two new slots to provide even more customization. The code mode slot lets you put in raw html into the builder giving you needed flexibility. In addition, the dynamic content slot can now be created and edited right from the builder.
• GoToWebinar confirmation link: The GoToWebinar integration has added capability. You can now insert the personalized confirmation link as part of followup emails, creating a seamless user experience.

Integrations

• Salesforce
  • Campaigns: Mautic now supports a bi-directional integration with Salesforce Campaigns! You can create a segment in Mautic and trigger a campaign based on campaign members from a Salesforce Campaign. You can also add contacts as campaign members in a Salesforce Campaign from a Mautic campaign or form action. Extending the integration far beyond sharing of contact, account, and lead detail.
  • Contact link: More Salesforce integration support! Now you can map the Mautic timeline link to a custom field in Salesforce to allow users (like your sales team) view that contact’s activities timeline directly from Salesforce. More data at your fingertips to encourage personalized conversations throughout the buying process!
• One Signal
  • Web Notifications: You can now user your own OneSignal account with Mautic to send Web notifications as part of campaigns.
  • Mobile Push Notifications: Mobile app push notifications are here! Use the One Signal plugin to send mobile push notifications to your iOS or Android app. Now you can create, send and track mobile notifications in Mautic.
• Twilio for SMS: Mautic can now connect to your Twilio account. If your contacts would like to receive communications via SMS, you can connect your Twilio account with Mautic and send SMS messages as part of campaigns. More integrations mean more relevance and personalization.

Whether you are moving prospects through a meaningful buying journey, or adding value at each stage, each area of execution requires a thoughtful consideration of the larger problem you are solving. That makes the tactics of marketing more significant.

We trust that these features, improvements and bug fixes will enable you and your entire business to respond to to each problem statement with clear focus and attention.

Release 2.8 encourages big picture thinking, while taking incredible strides to bring that picture to life for marketers. This release is now available for download to our open source community. For more detailed information, you can find the release notes here. If you have any questions or find new challenges that arise, join our feedback team and reach out to us on the Community Forums, Slack, or social channels (Facebook & Twitter) and we will respond as soon as we are able.

Github

Are you a developer? Continue making Mautic an industry disruptor by contributing to the fastest growing marketing automation project in open source today. Join us on Github!

Since Mautic was first conceived, usability has been a strategic imperative. Each feature and bug fix is designed and implemented in a way that re-enforces our goal of saving time and improving the user experience. Our latest release is no different. It not only checks bugs off the list, the process of automating multi-channel communications keeps getting easier and easier.

Better Salesforce Mapping:

• Integrations should make sharing information easy. We’ve created a new interface for mapping fields between Mautic and Salesforce that makes the process a snap. Not only that, but you can now specify which system is the master for each mapped field. So if you determine that a contact phone number can only be updated in Salesforce, this data will flow from Salesforce to Mautic and not the other way around.

Improving the Editor Experience:

• The email and landing page editors have gotten a usability facelift. New types of content slots are available to help create and design the most engaging assets possible. Easily create and add different types of content such as images, text, social follows and gated video. We’ve also included the ability to add multi-column sections giving you more flexibility in designing your page or email.

Release 2.7 saves time and streamlines workflow, making incredible strides in improving usability for marketers. This release is now available for download to our open source community, and is now live for our Mautic Cloud users. For more detailed information on this release, you can find the release notes here. If you have any questions or find new challenges that arise, join our feedback team and reach out to us on the Community Forums, Slack, or social channels (Facebook & Twitter) and we will respond as soon as we are able.