Why a Release Candidate 2?

Since the release of the first Release Candidate a month ago, we’ve made a substantial number of revisions. These modifications are primarily focused on eliminating old code and enhancing the quality of the existing code. While our priority has always been the stability and performance of Mautic, we also value cleanliness and efficiency of our codebase. A streamlined code structure helps us ensure the platform’s scalability and maintainability.

Most of this work was done by Thomas Votruba from Rector who contributed an astounding 60+ pull requests to improve Mautic using Rector. Massive thanks to Thomas for this work.

Given the broad nature of these revisions, it’s critical that we perform more rigorous testing than usual to ensure stability, hence the decision to release an RC2.

When is the General Availability release coming?

We’re planning to release the General Availability on 9th January, assuming all goes well with testing and documentation.

We need your help

Now, we invite you, our awesome Mautic community, to take part in this crucial stage of testing. Your input and insight will allow us to identify any issues that need attention before the final release. By participating in the testing of RC2, you are directly shaping the final version of Mautic 5 and helping us make it the most robust and stable version we’ve ever had.

How to get involved

To participate in testing, simply download the Mautic 5 Release Candidate 2 here if you want to work locally, or follow the instructions at https://mau.tc/tester for using Gitpod to test in the cloud. For any bugs encountered, please report them via our GitHub issues after searching to ensure it’s not already been reported, ensuring you mention that you’re testing the RC2.

We are incredibly grateful for your continued support and assistance in this process. The collaborative testing of RC2 represents our commitment to providing the most reliable and effective marketing automation platform out there.

Thank you in advance for your active contribution to our community testing!

This is a pre-release and should only be used in a test or development environment for the purposes of testing new features and bug fixes.

Here’s a rundown of all the fantastic work the contributors have done:

Refactoring

• The deprecated cache helper is now replaced. This is important because it allows you to use Redis instead of MySQL to cache requests, which is much faster and helps reduce the load on MySQL. Kudos to John Linhart for the improvement (#12699).

Features and Enhancements

• A new feature, the Email Click Heatmap, has been implemented by Patryk Gruszka to provide users with more in-depth insights (#12696). NB. This was available in the Beta release, but it was missed in the release notes due to a technical oversight.

Bug Fixes

Several bugs have been addressed in this release:

• When cloning an email, the publish up and down dates are copied over. This can cause issues when clients do not notice, and publish the email but have no intention of automatically sending it (yet) using broadcast:send. This has been fixed by Nick Vanpraet (#12784).
   
• When you clone emails with plaintext you see URLs in the tracking data from the original email, which is confusing for the user. This is now reset when cloning an email. This has been solved by Zdeno Kuzmany (#12748).
   
• A user with “View Others” access to contacts is unable to see any other contacts but their own on the dashboard widget for contacts created in time. This issue has been tackled by Jason Woods in their first contribution to Mautic! (#12819).
   
• Several places in Mautic resulted in a 500 error when cloning the entities, including reports and SMS message. This was due to a missing request object on clone operations which has been fixed by Mattias Michaux (#12811).
   
• When a user tries to perform an “override lock” action while another user is in the process of editing a form, it triggers an Error 500. This error disrupts the expected workflow and prevents the intended action from being completed. Nick Vanpraet resolved this bug. (#12837).
   
• When creating a new email, the options for selecting the preference centre were missing. This has been fixed by Anna Munk (#12829).
   
• And many more.

A big thank you to everybody who has helped with testing and reviewing over the last month:

• John Linhart (20)
• Zdeno Kuzmany (11)
• Patrick Jenkner (10)
• Ruth Cheesley (9)
• Patryk Gruszka (2)
• Volha Pivavrchyk (1)
• Jan Kozak (1)
• Mattias Michaux (1)
• Anna Munk (1)

If you’d like to help with this essential task – which can all be done in the browser without even needing to install Mautic – please check our onboarding guide at https://mau.tc/tester.

New Contributors

We’d like to give a shout-out to Jason Woods for their first contribution (#12819). Welcome to the Mautic community!

This release is the result of the outstanding work, skills, and dedication of the Mautic community. Mautic grows thanks to these collective efforts!

Please join us in testing this release candidate to ensure a smooth final release. Download the Mautic 5 Release Candidate here.

Please report any issues in #mautic-5 on Slack (get an invitation at https://mau.tc/slack-invite) so that the team can review them with you.

And as always, happy marketing automation!