Announcing the Mautic 5 Release Candidate

Dark blue gradient background with Mautic log in the middle and a large 5 in neon orange, pink and cyan with a yellow 5 faded in the background in the right, and Release Candidate in yellow text at the top right of the image.

We are excited to announce the Release Candidate of Mautic 5! This release sees numerous enhancements and bug fixes, maintaining our commitment to deliver a stable and improved platform to our community.

⚠️ 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.