“In order to gain more experience and contribute as a technical writer, I needed an open-source project that I can be a part of”, says the Nigerian-based developer about her start as a Mautic contributor. Favour’s previous contributions and engagement with the Mautic community were a decisive factor in the selection process of GSoD. “My experience as a member of the community has been amazing as I’ve learned a lot from the team”, she rejoices.

Community and open-source

Community has always been Favour’s focus: she defines herself as “specializing in building and creating accessible user experiences”. It is no wonder she joined communities in which those goals were also at the center of attention.

At Devcareer, a non-profit organization that supports African people getting a kickstart with their tech careers, Favour contributes as community manager. “I coordinate and engage over 13,000 tech enthusiasts across Africa in the community. I organize various community events, webinars, programs, and initiatives to engage community members.”

The open-source world followed closely behind, with the technical writer joining Hacktoberfest last year. Enter Mautic. Favour’s first contributions were related to moving the end-user documentation into the new platform.

Mautic, awareness and learning

To the Nigerian technical writer, “not enough people are aware of Mautic as an open-source marketing automation solution”. And she believes that creating awareness should go hand-in-hand with end-user documentation. “It is crucial that we raise awareness of the product and give adequate documentation to those using it for the first time”, Favour sums up.

And indeed, she lives by her words, as she understands documentation as part of the user experience. “Good end-user documentation implies that you care about your users and are taking steps to make things easier for them”, wrote the software developer in her application for GSoD.

Before GSod, Favour was already working with the Education team in moving the end-user documentation into the new platform. “My favorite part about joining this community is that everyone is willing to help you solve a problem when you run into any roadblock. It has been a pleasure to work with the team these past few months”, she recalls.

Contributing, building and rejoicing

Working with amazing people is not the only benefit that Favour and other contributors get from being a part of the community. “You also get immediate feedback on your development and programming/technical writing skills which will help in your career along the way”. For her, this goes beyond an individual perk, as it advanced the industry in general.

Personally, Favour’s goal in life is “to lead a team of creative developers while working together to build an amazing product”. She also dreams of “creating more opportunities for folks to get started in tech and contribute to open source while bridging the gap for women in tech”.

“People should consider contributing to open-source because it is a great way to build your network. You get to join a welcoming community of open-source contributors like Mautic, interact with them in the open-source space, and build relationships along the way”, enumerates the Nigerian technical writer.

If you share Favour Chibueze’s dream and want to know more about the topics she’s working on, you can follow her on Twitter and LinkedIn.

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

In this article, Dennis explains a little about the idea behind the Marketplace, and provides a sneak peak of other features to come. He also tells us about how he got involved with the Mautic community and what he likes best about it.

From the tool to the love

Dennis first came across Mautic in 2020, when searching for a Marketing automation tool for a customer. At the time he was working as a self-employed developer, and his first instinct was to look for an open source solution. “There were a few features I thought were missing in Mautic, so I thought maybe I could contribute”, he recalls.

And so he did. He started off with the features he had in mind, but the more he worked, the more curious he was about the open source community. “Things were so well organized, and I wanted to know how people managed that”, he explains. Dennis started contributing more and more, and eventually joined the Product Team.

The fun, the learning and the balance

Dennis describes that contributing to the community is “a lot of fun” and a great learning opportunity. “Beyond developing features for Mautic users, I have an intrinsic motivation to learn more. There’s so much happening”, he sums up. 

On the tech side, helping with product development allows Dennis to dive into different code stacks. But he is also very interested in the open source aspect of Mautic. “There’s a level of responsibility when you decide to jump in and try to find a solution for a given problem”, he points out.

Though Dennis took this responsibility really seriously, the Norwegian developer got a little too involved and things “got out of hand a bit”. He explains that at some point he was dedicating more time than he had, outside of his working hours, so he decided to find a balance between working and contributing.

Enter the Mautic Marketplace

Dennis has been a part of the development of previous major updates of Mautic. He highlights two of them: the upgrade script and the Mautic Marketplace. The first feature allowed for smooth migration to new Mautic releases, “it was a major update and involved a lot of work behind the scenes”. 

His most recent contribution is not at all under the hood, to the contrary: the Mautic Marketplace made its debut on the 4.2 version, released in February 2022. “We hope it will be a game changer”, introduces Dennis.

The developer details that the Marketplace is more than “just” a place to download Mautic plugins. “For starters, it will make plugin contributors much more visible to the community. It will also make it a lot easier for users to know there are plugins and to be able to install them with the click of a button.”

Having the Marketplace, which is launching as beta, is also a way to stimulate the growth of the plugin developers community. With the adoption of Composer from Mautic 5 going forward, the team Dennis is a part of is working on ways to make it easier for plugin contributors to come up with new tools. “We wanna have a sort of ‘plugin generator’ that allows you to create a very basic plugin in maybe an hour, and then build up from there.”

As a community, Mautic’s enhancements will benefit not only the developers, but also the users. “Marketplaces will boost the ecosystem.” Having more plugins available, as well as being able to install and manage them easily will be a major improvement to marketers. “I’m excited to see where our community is going”, describes Dennis about the future.

The power of open source and the Mautic community

For Dennis, the tech side is always accompanied by the community aspect of his contributions. “With an open source app, you can develop your own product, but you can also develop with the community. And though some companies will do a lot ‘in house’, a lot of other companies are willing to pay so specialists can take care of the technical part for them”, he describes.

The software developer believes in a balance between healthy income and open source coding. “We already have a few examples of how this can work, there are specialized companies that run Mautic and are supporting customers very well. This business model is super interesting.”

Dennis reiterates that those companies usually contribute back to the community, which makes for an even more diverse group. As a matter of fact, his favorite past about the Mautic community is that it’s fully international. 

“We have asynchronous meetings, so people all over the world can jump into it at the best time for them. It’s all in writing: we post the topics and discuss them over a 24-hours period. Everyone can contribute and reply”, he exemplifies. “It really is remote-first.”

The Norwegian developer also highlights that this type of meeting allows people time to think and to come up with great feedback. It enhances contributions, on the one hand, and also gives more room for different types of people and of contributions. 

Dennis highlights that the Mautic community is also very well established. “We have a code of conduct, an organization structure, a stable product that we develop even further”. Finally, for those considering contributing to the Mautic community, he compliments how “there’s always room for improvement and new ideas”.

What the future holds

There’s a lot to be done, and Dennis invites all willing parties to be a part of Mautic’s future. He even provides a sneak peak into what is to come: “One thing we’ve been discussing in the Product Team is how we could decouple the front-end (user interface) and the back-end (technology)”. This would allow companies to forgo the use of Mautic visual interface and integrate Mautic’s technology directly into the companies’ own infrastructure.

“To achieve this goal we are looking into ways to integrate the API. It all has to be very well documented, very smooth to work with”, he sums up. And, of course, to undertake such an endeavor, the more hands, the better. “We can alway use more people”, he hints.

Personally, Dennis believes in technology at the service of people. Currently working on softwares to decarbonize electrical grids, he points out that his choice is always to work with products that put human beings at their center. “Software is such a big part of my life, but there’s a human side to each application. It’s not just about making a lot of money, it’s about building products that will have an impact on society, that will empower people.”

If you want to know more about software development and Dennis Ameling, you can follow him on Twitter or check out his GitHub repo, @dennisameling.

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

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.

In this article, Favour explains how she became part of the Mautic community, what she has been contributing with and where she sees the project going in the future.

Why Mautic?

​​Favour has always been involved in the open source community, having participated in Google Summer of Code 2019 and 2020 as both a student and mentor respectively. She was also selected to begin working with Mautic through Google Season of Docs 2020.  Favour started her path as a developer, and was transitioning to a technical writer career when she participated in the program.

Her new career was one of the factors that led her to choose Mautic during Google’s program, as she was able to choose to work not with development, but with documentation. In looking for an interesting project, Favour read up on Mautic. “I felt like I resonated more with this community, that here I could make more impact”, she recalls.

Once she started contributing, she met people that were both organised and accommodating. After the program’s three-month period, she decided to stay on, which she credits in part to Mautic “such a nice and impactful community”.

Why documentation?

“A technical writer is part of every project, and I really love writing”, Favour sums up. She remembers feeling anxious at the beginning of her new career, but that changed once she understood better how the daily activities work. “It is just explaining in the simplest way the process of doing something ”, she details.

Favour’s decision to change careers was also motivated by how much she likes to make an impact on the community. She exults how great it feels to be helping people in understanding and making use of tools and resources. In addition to documentation, she highlights that her day to day job includes writing articles, newsletters and other resources that connect users to the program they are working with.

At Mautic, the Nigerian technical writer has been instrumental in documenting new releases and features, as well as in growing Mautic’s Knowledge Base with more step-by-step guides, assets and other high-value contents. Answering users’ questions is also a big part of what she and her peers are contributing with.

What is going on now?

Favour has been working on standardising some of the documentation, as well as keeping it up-to-date and useful. “People use Mautic in different countries, and we have new releases every quarter. It is essential that these users can get the information that they need”, she mentions.

The fact that Mautic is a free tool is also, in Favour’s view, an important aspect that may draw people to this resource. “Documentation helps users to really get how a program works and how to use it”, she details. The technical writer argues that having up-to-date, easy-to-understand information readily available is also part of what makes Mautic accessible.

What does the future hold?

To Favour, great documentation is a very valuable resource to users. Along with spreading the word about Mautic, upgrading those assets and the Knowledge base is her way of helping with Mautic’s growth, as well as contributing to the marketing field altogether.

“It is not just comercial business that can benefit from using Mautic, but many people don’t use marketing automation tools because they don’t really know how. So we are working to bridge that gap, to raise awareness as to what Mautic can do and how people may benefit from it.”

Favour and her team (Leon-Elias Oltmanns, Favour Chibueze, Pragati, Destiny, Robin M) are also working on a new website, which should be released in 2022. This involves migrating both the documentation and the Knowledge base into platforms that will make it easier for Mautic users to get all the information that they need at ease.

“I’m really happy for everyone’s contributions and effort towards this goal. We want Mautic to be on top, to let people know about this open source tool for marketing automation.” 

What about the Mautic community?

To Favour, the best part about the Mautic community is that people can fully be themselves and can contribute in whatever capacity they feel comfortable with. “Everybody has day jobs, they are busy, and everyone in the community appreciates whatever time people can take to do one or two things”, she compliments.

She, for one, rejoices in every little contribution, which she credits to the hard work of each and every member. In her professional life, Favour’s goal is to work as a project manager, with creative teams. “I want to be in a team that works together towards a goal, a team that grows together”, she explains.

Favour is also a co-organizer of the Mautic Meetup Lagos. The Mautic Meetup Lagos takes place once a month, and has different speakers who lecture participants on various Mautic-related topics – as well as any other topics in the open source ecosystem.

Why contribute?

“If you love challenges, you gotta be out there”, Favour sums up. In her opinion, contributing to an open source project such as Mautic is a way of “touching the lives of people and of organisations”. She also points out that the experience in itself is a great benefit, and one that can figure on contributors’ resumes as well.

For those who like to write, having the basic skill is enough to get started, Favour incentivises: “if you can explain something, you can write about it”. She also highlights that contributing to an open source project can kick start people’s careers and land them jobs, as they will be in contact with a great team, full of experienced professionals. “There’s plenty of opportunities, and any contribution you can make will be very valuable”, she pleads.

If you want to know more about technical writing and Favour Kelvin, you can read her blog at Medium or check out her GitHub repo, @fakela.

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

Adrian still believes in “making Mautic accessible to everyone”. As more and more customers relied on Mautic to grow their business, Aivie was born. Aivie offers cloud-hosted Mautic, support, training, themes and plugin development.

The New Mautic Email and Landing Page Builder

Adrian was not planning to contribute code to Mautic on such a big scale. At some point he realized that Mautic needs a new email builder to stay competitive. So he co-launched the Builder initiative. And that’s when he stumbled into the development of the new email and landing page builder, which had been initiated by Webmecanik but needed further refinement to be incorporated as the default builder for Mautic.

He started first by contributing a few changes in the codebase, then moved to code refactoring where he felt there was a need for improvement, and changing tools to establish a better architecture, laying the foundation for future improvements and a higher quality of code.

The initial intent to make just some quick changes to the Mautic codebase, turned into many weeks enjoying improving things for everyone. He also tried as much as possible to test, clean up and remove any unnecessary code and files, making the Mautic codebase as streamlined as possible.

What’s Next With The New Builder?

Introducing the new email and landing page builder in Mautic 4 was a giant step. There are still improvements and features that could be added, as suggested by the community. Adrian is looking forward to building up basic functionality, adding animations, videos, and a reusable content block, and having a global footer that can be used in every email without the need to create them each time an email is to be sent.

There is a lot of room for improvement, and Adrian wants everyone to join in contributing too. Are you wondering how you can contribute to the new builder? Yes, you can contribute! Here are some ideas:
 

• Create email and landing page templates for different purposes which can help community members to quickly set up email campaigns or landing pages by only changing the text and maybe some few blocks and colors,
• Write documentation or knowledgebase articles on how to work with the new email and landing page builder:
  • Docs.mautic.org for factual, product documentation,
  • Developer.mautic.org for developer-focused documentation,
  • Kb.mautic.org for how-to tutorials, guides and best practice information,
• Help to triage and fix open issues,
• Test new features and bug fixes,
• If you can’t contribute in these ways, consider making a financial donation to the builders project here. This helps us to support external specialists with skills we need to expand our builder by adding new functionality.

Why Contribute to Open Source

For an open source project to thrive it requires that there are people contributing to the project, and Adrian strongly encourages Mautic users to give back in whatever way they are able. It is not only developers that can contribute to Mautic but marketers who benefit from using it too – marketers can help with testing, reviewing new features, and providing input of what might be missing from the new builder.

Why Contribute to Mautic?

Using Mautic, Nick discovered that there are things to be improved on, and he made his first contribution to the Mautic 3 codebase. He immediately noticed that there wasn’t a smooth workflow when updating Mautic and things could possibly break if you don’t know what you’re doing. Nick’s desire for contributing to Mautic, from a developer’s point of view, was to make Mautic maintainable and sustainable.

In order to dramatically improve the process (and help the knowledge-gap within the community), he took it upon himself with some other contributors to make Mautic compatible with Composer. He was the major contributor to get the initial pieces of Composer working within Mautic 3.

Contributing to Mautic 4

In Mautic 4 there was a Strategic Initiative to re-architect how Mautic is put together and make these composer packages work absolutely cohesively.

Most people update Mautic with the click of a button or a large series of command line instructions. Now, you can update Mautic with a simple Composer command!

Is this your first time hearing about this? Are you wondering what Composer is all about? Let us dissect it in simple terms. 

Simply said, Composer manages pieces of code that Mautic depends on. These pieces of code are called ‘packages.’ All these packages can be downloaded and put in a kind of folder to be integrated with Mautic – but that does not mean it is updated and maintainable.

The key that is unlocked with Composer is to bring together all the packages that a project relies on from external sources and also make sure that when there are new external project updates and security fixes, they are also reflected in the Mautic installation automatically.

Why Composer in Mautic 4

As Mautic matures and attracts more in-project contributions and custom development work by third-parties, Composer is the only way to go. It also helps to test new features in a development environment before deploying them into staging or production.

An example of the power that Composer brings to Mautic is the foundation that has been built in Mautic 4 to create a Marketplace where it will be easy to install add-ons from a pool of different and exciting new features. Another example is our new Email Builder, which is fully integrated into a Mautic installation using Composer.

Give it a Try

Developers can try it out and spin up projects under the mautic/recommend-project using a single Composer command where you can download, configure, and do all specific to Composer and gives you a usable and secure installation of Mautic from the start. Take a few minutes to explore and see the difference between the old method versus using Composer – there is no functional difference.

You Can Also Contribute

Right now, we can use YOUR help with documenting the upgrade flow for people that are currently not using Composer in their Mautic instance.

Thank You, Nick

We’d like to take a moment to thank Nick for his valued volunteer contributions into leading the monumental effort to Composer-ify Mautic and for taking the time to be interviewed for this article. We appreciate your contribution to the community and for the time spent, resources and zeal.

You want to contribute to the Mautic Community? You can learn more about contributing here.