Hello lovely supporters of Mautic, it's great to be writing to you again this month after a wonderful November filled with all things community!
At the start of the month many of us headed over to Lisbon, Portugal for Mautic Conference Europe - a two-day event of conference and community sprint which was also followed by our first in-person Council meeting, kindly hosted by Dominique de Cooman. It was really wonderful to see everyone at the event and there were some great pearls of wisdom shared in the talks, from the opening keynote telling us what not to do when it comes to strategy (and supported by a free book from Jenna Tiffany for all attendees for homework!) to sessions on whether Mautic actually needs segments, how to nail your email sending in Mautic 5 and experiences with contributing to Mautic in no/low code.
I can't wait for the videos to come out as there were many talks I couldn't get to due to us running two parallel tracks throughout the day. Watch this space, they should be coming out next week!
We also had some lovely posts in our #today-we-celebrate channel on Slack from Mauticians celebrating Diwali, I hope those of you who celebrate had a lovely time with your families. Please do use this channel to share local festivals, events and other celebrations (and don't forget #pets, too!) - it's a great way to celebrate our diverse international community.
If you weren't with us in Portugal you might have caught some of the breaking news updates which I shared, namely:
A new website is in development for mautic.org due to launch on 6 January - we do still have tasks for contributors so please drop into #wg-website-rebuild if you'd like to work on this with us.
We've adopted a new release strategy including Long Term Support versions, clearly defined release dates aligned with our major dependencies (Symfony and PHP), and eventually will see us on a 24 month cycle between major releases and each release series being supported for at least three years (https://mau.tc/new-release-strategy)
Extended Long Term Support for Mautic offering up to two years of security support if you're not ready to upgrade by the end of official security support - this is launching for Mautic 4 imminently.
Mautic Conference Global will be held on 9-10 July 2025. It'll be online and we'll be opening the Call for Speakers and Sponsors pretty soon, so hold the date in your diary!
We received funding from NLNet to hire a developer and project manager to start working on the foundational work to enable a campaign library - we're in the middle of the recruitment process currently, and plan to hire by the end of the year.
Of course this newsletter would be incomplete without celebrating the epic release of Mautic 5.2 just at the start of December,m which sees an entire overhaul of the user interface alongside many great new features and 75 bug fixes. We've already found a few bugs which made it through our testing and we'll be making the next patch release - 5.2.1 - early next week to address these.
In terms of community health, please check the latest Open Startup Report where I explained some of the challenges we've had this month.
While the income is looking strong for the new year, I shared at Mautic Conference Europe that right now we're facing around a $50,000 deficit at the end of the year, mainly due to a shortfall in funding from the Trials revenue, corporate sponsorship and event sponsorship/ticket sales.
We're working hard to address this through several avenues and we're confident that we're making good strides towards closing the gap, but any support you can offer through one-time donations or perhaps by becoming a corporate member (or upgrading your tier) would be super appreciated.
