Today we are highlighting another contributor to the Mautic 4 release - this time we welcome Nikola Nedić who was a key contributor to the Tag Manager interface.

Nikola likes to contribute to several open source projects, not just Mautic. He believes in the project and has in the past helped with documentation, which he feels is a critical area developers look into before contributing to any project. He has previously contributed to the plugin manager of Mautic and now in the Mautic 4 release he has contributed to the Tag Manager - which was one of the most requested features in the community - by building the user interface.

Why Tag Manager?

After having a discussion with Ekke Guembel on Slack about the need for tag manager, Nikola felt inspired to raise a pull request (PR) on Mautic Repository. Having passed the integration and functional tests and been tested by the community, it was merged into the Mautic core codebase in the Mautic 4 beta pre-release. 

You may be wondering what the Tag Manager is all about? As Ekke defines tag manager in this video, "tags are some kind of sticky notes that you can add to contacts that you can act on later".

The Tag Manager interface allows you to view all of the tags in your Mautic instance, quickly filter all the contacts with a specific tag, and to manage the tags themselves. Tag configuration is easy to do in Mautic 4 - you can add tags to a contact with campaigns or form actions.

You might be wondering "what else does this do apart from assigning some text to contacts for identification?" Well, sometimes there can be tags which might not be useful anymore and need to be deleted. This is where the Tag Manager shines, and not just with adding and removing tags but also renaming them.

The Future of Tag Management

While the Tag Manager in Mautic is working as expected today, Nick thinks that in future a dashboard which shows the statistics of the tag usage would also be useful to have.

In the community forum where tag management was also discussed, Ekke mentioned other features that could be added, including: 

• allow a comment per tag to explain what it is used for, 
• audit log (origin, changes), 
• show places of use per tag.

He further mentioned future ideas outside of the Tag Manager including: 

• intelligent tag actions (e.g. dynamic values), 
• switch in settings to “disallow new tag creation through the tracking pixel” (to avoid spam through attackers / SQL Injection).

Nikola’s Motivation

Nikola's motivation to contribute to open source projects is based on two things, first is to help fellow developers to contribute more easily, and he likes interesting challenges that help him to increase in knowledge. Secondly, contributing to Mautic also helps to raise his profile in the community which may bring future opportunities. Nikola does not just contribute to Mautic, but also actively contributes to other open source projects which meet with his personal mission.

Nikola Nedić is a software engineer at Digital Innovation Lab AG, a tech startup accelerator located in Switzerland.