Adrian Schimpf came across Mautic a few years ago when he was looking for a solution for one of his projects. He liked it and realized that it was such a great tool to have. He installed Mautic and also started installing it for clients and wanted to make it easy for people to use. So he decided to go ahead and build a solution that offers all the benefits of Mautic, and is as easy to install and operate as a cloud solution.

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.