Announcing Mautic.org 2.0

Beginning a New Chapter for Our Community

As we reach the end of 2017 people everywhere will begin looking back on the previous year and their accomplishments. The highs and the lows will be analyzed and reviewed. Assessments over what was successful shared on every blog and every social media channel. And you can almost hear the collective sigh over those times we came up short. The Mautic community will probably do the same. But I’m reminded of a song lyric you may have heard before -

Every new beginning comes from some other beginning's end.
- Closing Time, Semisonic

What a great line! I believe that for Mautic this means maybe we should look forward instead of backward. Let’s look at 2018 as a new beginning coming from our 2017’s ending. In fact, we wanted to do something more. We wanted to start 2018’s new beginning now. Confused? Let me see if I can make it a bit more obvious. The Mautic community is going to do some amazing things next year. Incredibly amazing. We have tremendous growth ahead of us and some fantastic initiatives we are going to undertake. In order to achieve everything we want to we are starting our new beginning now.

Whether you want to think of this as an early holiday gift, or just a jumpstart on 2018; make no mistake, what comes next is truly awesome. Today, the Mautic community is announcing a number of exciting improvements. Some are obvious, some are complete and some are just getting started. But all of these things need your input! Allow me to walk you through what’s new.

1. Brand New Mautic.org

The first and most obvious update is the new Mautic.org website. If you’re here reading then you’ve already seen it, but please let me walk you through it. The Mautic community is truly one of a kind, the biggest open source marketing automation community in the world, and yet our website didn’t focus on our community in any way. We didn’t provide a good home for our volunteers to showcase their talents, share their resources, or find good help. We’ve changed all of that! Here’s what is now available for our incredible Mauticians.

2. Mauticians

Did you catch that name drop? We have been unofficially calling our community members “Mauticians” for the last 2 years and yet the name has never been made official. Today we’re declaring any Mautic volunteer a Mautician. Any one contributing (in any area) of the Mautic project is now qualified to call themselves a Mautician. We’re excited to be able to clearly define who we are and how we are defined as a community. But the name is just the beginning of this particular new item. Keep reading:

Mautic.org now features a new community portal where our volunteers can show off their achievements, connect with others, build their profiles and so much more. Seriously, if you haven’t already looked around you should go take a peek at https://www.mautic.org/mauticians

Here’s the lowdown: if you had an account in the Mautic forums before then you already have an account on this new site...but you’ll need to reset your password. (Yeah, I’m sorry about that, but we like to keep things safe and this just helps to reinforce that the passwords are secure.) Go ahead and get logged in again and get to setting up your profile!

Oh, and then you’ll want to get involved with others near you, either in person or in area of interest - which means it’s time to look at the next new thing.

3. MautiCamps

The Mautic community has an aspect which, from the very beginning, has made us unique. Our community has self-organized into localized groups faster than just about any other community. In order to stay on top of things we quickly implemented an existing Meetup tool that worked great for us in the beginning but we quickly found limitations (not to mention it was costly).

Our volunteer community shouldn’t have to use proprietary solutions, spend additional money and take unnecessary steps to build their local community group. Oh, and we wanted a better name (Nothing’s wrong with Mautic Meetups necessarily; we just wanted something special). The solution to all these problems was creating MautiCamps.

A MautiCamp is a community-lead group of Mauticians that meet regularly to discuss all things Mautic-related. They may be geographically relevant, topic specific or even skill based.

Pretty cool right? A MautiCamp can even be virtual. Don’t be constrained with physical boundaries. Have a group of Mauticians that want to meet every month around the topic of theme development? MautiCamp Themes. Maybe you’re in the Toronto area and want to meet face-to-face with other Mauticians, join MautiCamp Toronto. There really are no limitations when it comes to MautiCamps. Interested in learning more? Here’s a blog post you should read. Check out the existing MautiCamps to see if there are any you’d like to join. And if you don’t see the right one for your town or your area of interest... jump in and start leading it! The forums will have more information on this topic and would be a great place to get started.

4. Mautic Forums

Wow, the new things keep coming and the excitement continues to grow. And I just love how the ending for each previous new feature leads us directly into the next one. The forums we had were good. In fact, I liked them because they were fast and kinda pretty. But they had some issues too. They didn’t sync well with the rest of the site. There was no visibility into how they related to Mauticians. There was a general lack of functionality and things like pagination were missing (who knew that would feel so nice to have). Oh, and the search wasn’t so great. I am pleased to share we have rebuilt the forums directly into the website. Everything integrated into one brand-new, beautiful home.

The new Mautic Community forums feature all the things that we were missing before. Now of course as we launch there will be some issues and a few minor glitches (like the user account situation I shared earlier). So, if you haven’t done so, you’ll need to reset your password. But that’s really about the only change you’ll have to make. Your forum posts, comments, replies will now all be available on your Mautician page as well, which is super nice.

So those are the new features of Mautic.org. A complete rebuild from the ground up. A re-focusing on the value of our community and the power of our volunteers. We’re putting the focus where it should be - on the individuals who make up our community.

Oh, but wait, there’s one more thing. I don’t know how I could have forgotten this one:

5. Mautic Marketplace

With the launch of the new Mautic.org website we are also unveiling Version 1 of the Mautic Marketplace. This early iteration will allow you to submit your Mixin for inclusion in the Marketplace.

A Mixin is a plugin, integration, theme, workflow or package that can be added to a Mautic instance to add or extend functionality or design in some way.

This Marketplace is an early version. There will be things to improve here as we grow. We knew we needed some way to organize the many amazing tools our community was already creating, even in these beginning days. We’ve added some of the Mixins we're aware of - if you own one of them please be sure to reach out so we can give you ownership of the Mixin.

The Mautic Marketplace will eventually be available within the Mautic product and you’ll be able to install them incredibly easily. What we are building takes time to do it right, and as with everything in Mautic, we want to build it the right way. Don’t let this stop you. Start contributing your Mixins today. Build your plugins, your integrations, your themes and get your name and company brand out there in front of the hundreds of thousands of Mautic organizations.

There will be a much more detailed post coming in the future weeks that will share more of the specifics and features of the Mautic Marketplace initiative. Check back on our blog or sign up for our newsletter to stay informed!

Shoot, did I mention the newsletter? I guess I have to tell you about that too! If you just feel like you don’t have quite enough Mautic in your life then you’ll want to sign up for The Mautic Moment. This is our community newsletter (I'm not going to say how often we’re sending - for now we’re going to just say ‘infrequently’). Interested in writing for The Mautic Moment? It’s a community newsletter so you’re encouraged to get involved!

Okay, so just to recap:

We’ve launched a new Mautic.org website...
Our community members are called Mauticians...
We rebuilt our community meetups into MautiCamps...
The Mautic forums are new, improved and integrated...
We’ve launched the first version of the Mautic Marketplace...
And we have a newsletter, The Mautic Moment to stay in the know.

And now I really need to end this post. Or should I say, I need to go prepare the beginning for the next one. Join me in celebrating these many new features that we’re beginning. Mautic isn’t ending 2017; instead Mautic is starting 2018 a little bit early. With this many fantastic new initiatives for you to get involved in I encourage you to get started. Go out and get involved. I’ll leave you with one more lyric from the start of the song I shared the ending from earlier.