Here we are, already into the new year and catching up after the holidays!  Over the last two months, a group of dedicated engineers have been hard at work on the next major release of Mautic, Mautic 3. Here is what to expect.

Under-The-Hood Release

Mautic 3 (referred to as "M3") is the third iteration of the world's first Open Source Marketing Automation platform.

It brings a complete refurbishment of several key parts of Mautic ‘under the hood’, including major upgrades of the underlying frameworks such as Symfony and jQuery, and also of many more dependencies.

Also, the minimum PHP version will be increased from 5.6.19 to 7.2.21 and the minimum MySQL version will be raised from 5.5.3 to 5.7.

These long-awaited improvements are not only important for future security; stability and performance, but also lays the foundation for Mautic 4. This is expected to bring some much-requested features and changes to ensure Mautic remains the go-to choice for the digital marketer.

Although there will be a lot of changes in the codebase with this release there will be little impact to Mautic users in their daily work – you will find the user interface and the feature set largely unchanged.

Plugin Developers, Get Ready

Mautic 3 will come with “breaking changes” at the code level (mostly due to changes in Symfony) which means that developers will need to update their code to work with Mautic 3.

If you maintain your own Mautic Plugins, themes or integrations, please make sure you review the technical notes and plan to upgrade them accordingly.  Information can be found in the UPGRADE-3.0.0.md file which will ship with the releases.

The good news is: We will see very few significant changes in the database structure and schema, or in the API. 

Question: When is the best time to prepare the upgrade for my Mautic Plugin?

Answer: Right away! Simply work on removing the deprecations listed in the upgrade file, and test against Mautic 2 – that is a fully valid verification.  Once the alpha and beta releases are available you can also test against those.

Administrators, Get Ready

One consistent goal in the development process for Mautic 3 has been a painless, easy upgrade path for existing Mautic installations. 

There are, however, some key changes that administrators of Mautic instances will need to bear in mind when testing (and later, migrating to) Mautic 3:

• {leadfield=...} tokens were removed. Use {contactfield=...} tokens instead.
• The minimum PHP version will be 7.2.21
• The minimum MySQL version will be 5.7
• Console was moved to another directory. Update all your cron jobs and replace app/console with bin/console
• There is a new file manager. You can see it when you go to a WYSIWYG editor and try to add an image for example.
• The Rackspace and OpenStack plugins for remote assets were removed due to outdated library from Rackspace.

As a Mautic administrator, there are a couple of other things to consider:

1. Is there any third-party code (e.g. plugins, themes, customisations) in your installation?
   
   If so, get in touch with the authors and ask them for an M3-ready version.
    
2. Is there any outside software that is talking to your Mautic instance via API (e.g. a CMS integration)?
   
   If so, ask the vendor to review any M3 changes which might affect the integration, and verify that the integrations will continue to function.
    
3. Prepare your test environment!
   
   You should NOT run the upgrade on the live system that you depend on without first testing the update. So, by all means, create a copy of your Mautic instance now so that you’re ready when the release is made available. Not sure how to do this? We have a blog post coming soon, which will walk you through step-by-step.

You may want to prepare an email to inform your users of the update and telling them of any specific changes that you expect as a result - for example the new WYSIWYG editor, and any updates to third-party integrations or themes.

Mautic 3 Timeline

The following is the proposed timeline*:

Friday, 10th January 2020 - Alpha release of Mautic 3 available for testing
10-17th January 2020 - Testing period for alpha release of Mautic 3

Monday, 20th January 17th February 2020 - Beta release of Mautic 3 available for testing
20th January - 2nd February 17th February - 17th May 2020 - Testing period for beta release of Mautic 3

Monday 18th May 2020 - Beta 2 release of Mautic 3 available for testing
18th - 27th May 2020 - Testing period for beta 2 release of Mautic 3

Wednesday 27th May 2020 - Stable release of Mautic 3

Early releases (alpha and beta) are an important opportunity for the community to help with quality assurance by testing across the wide range of different environments and configurations in use, so please do test as thoroughly as you can (again, on your test area and NOT on your live instance), and provide all the feedback you have!

* Updated 18th May 2020 to reflect expected release date of Mautic 3 stable

Be A Part Of It

Mautic 3 is a collaborative effort by the Mautic Community, at this point, including substantial support by Acquia’s engineering team.

The team is very open to community members getting involved in working on all aspects of the Mautic 3 release (and of course in future releases, too) e.g.

• as a developer (junior or senior),
• by testing individual elements ("PRs"; doesn't require any coding skills!) or by testing and providing feedback on the alpha/beta release,
• as a designer or marketer (find out about the Marketing Team),
• by updating and improving the documentation (find out about the Education Team),

Getting started is really easy, and the best way to get in touch is always the Slack channels, e.g https://mautic.slack.com/archives/CPVGZE516 (sign up on https://www.mautic.org/slack/).

Credits

Thanks to Ekkehard Gümbel, Alan Hartless, John Linhart, Don Gilbert, Mary Matson for writing and editing the article and providing information about the release.