I was lucky to attend the Mautic Conference Europe 2024 thanks to Acquia. I was also accepted to speak at the conference. I usually talk on the topic of "I built a cool thing." Not this time. This time I went the opposite way, pointing out how many unnecessary features Mautic has and how cool it would be to remove them for users, performance, and maintenance costs. The video recording will be published soon, and I'll make sure to link it here when it is.

Day 1 - The Talks

Day 1 was packed with two tracks of quality presentations from the community. I wish I could have listened to both tracks. I will surely watch the recordings when they are released. Here are some presentations I was able to attend:

Opening Keynote: Top 5 Common Marketing Strategy Pitfalls to Avoid by Jenna Tiffany

Jenna started the conference with a great talk targeting the marketing audience. I always look forward to learning more about the issues marketers have, as they are Mautic's users. Jenna showed us some examples of poor communication, the difference between strategy and tactics, and the importance of vision. I was happy that in the Q&A part of the session, Jenna mentioned that personalization is still the trend marketers should focus on, which Mautic is all about. Plus, purchasing contact lists is a big NO-NO. Glad to hear that, because I can still see this happening.

Jenna also gave everyone a signed copy of her book in the goodie bag!

Sending Emails: A Technical View for Non-Technical People by Jozsef Keller

I was looking forward to this talk because I think that's what is blocking Mautic 5 from being deployed to production. Joey showed how to configure Mautic 5's AWS SES transport. He tested four plugins, so you don't have to. He mentioned the differences between sending emails from Mautic 4 (too slow) and Mautic 5 (too fast). I was surprised to learn that SES has a limit on how many emails it can consume per second, and Mautic needs to be slowed down to avoid losing emails. We don't have this issue with Sparkpost at Acquia.

Beyond Mautic Reports: Mastering Data Visualization and Insights with Google Looker Studio by Leon-Elias Oltmanns and Patrick Jenkner

I was very curious about this because we haven’t solved the reporting issue in Acquia Campaign Studio yet. We see that core Mautic reporting doesn't show all the metrics our customers need. Leon and Patrick showed an implementation they did for one of their customers, where they created a shadow database in the format they needed and without personally identifiable information (PII). They then connected it to Google Looker Studio to build the reports the customer needs to evaluate their marketing campaigns. They can also merge information from Mautic with information from the customer's e-shop. They create a hash from email addresses so it's not PII anymore, but they can still match it with the same hash from the e-shop, and this way, they see which campaigns led contacts to buy goods. A pretty neat solution. It perhaps even makes sense to build such reporting outside of Mautic since multiple data sources are necessary to build it.

The Mautic Update: Keynote by Ruth Cheesley

Ruth went through the stats from the community to celebrate the most active individuals and companies. She shared the exciting news that the new mautic.org website is close to being ready and that it will focus more on Mautic itself rather than on the community alone. The community also received funding to build the campaign sharing feature, as well as all the UI/UX improvements and other features coming in Mautic 5.2. There was also an announced release schedule, including extended long-term support. Ruth went through the Google Summer of Code projects and upcoming features like better bounce management and certifications. So many great initiatives are going on!

Ruth also shared the project’s financial situation, noting that the community is getting very close to zero in the account. That would mean Ruth wouldn't be able to work for the community full-time anymore, and most progress in the community would stop or significantly slow down. These things are hard to talk about, but it was necessary to make the project successful. Please consider donating if you value the work Ruth is adding.

The Evolving Role of the Email Marketer: Essential Skills and Metrics for Success by Dmytro Kudrenko

Again, I wanted to learn more about the problems marketers solve. Although Dmytro really tried not to promote Stripo, I was most interested in that tool and kind of wish it would have been more focused on it. It seemed pretty cool and built with great ideas in mind. But that's just me and my professional deformation from building Mautic for ten years. Stripo can push email HTML with a button press to Mautic. I would definitely consider using that tool together with Mautic if I were a marketer.

The Mautic Awards

This was a great ending to the first conference day. The first-ever Mautic awards were given to the winners. Congratulations!

Day 2 - The Action

Day 2 was the community sprint. I had a blast. There were two groups, and I was part of the product team group. We started working on Mautic 6. By the end of the day, we had Mautic working on Symfony 6! As a bonus, there's now a working version that changes Mautic's JS dependencies to Symfony Encore, which simplifies the build and enables a modern way to write JS, including TypeScript! A lot of PRs got tested and more work was done. A few more community sprints like this, and we could move Mautic to a new level.

Day 3 - The Council

As a Mautic Council member, I was invited to attend the Mautic Council Meeting on Wednesday, where we discussed the financial situation most of the time. Dominique from DropSolid invited us to his office near Lisbon.

Thank You

I returned from sunny and warm Lisbon to cold and foggy Prague, full of newly charged energy from the amazing group of talented and passionate people I met at the conference. I’d especially like to thank Lenon and Ricardo for taking such great care of all of us, more than I would expect from family members. Thank you! Thank you to everyone who shared photos; I hope you don’t mind that I used some of them in this post to highlight the atmosphere. I think one is from Ruth, another from Favour, and the rest are mine. Thank you to all the new friends I made over those few days in the beautiful city of Lisbon. Thanks to all the sponsors that made this conference possible and thanks to Acquia that sent me there!