My idea is:
Remove the CalendarBundle from Mautic 5 completely. It is one of the core bundles so one option is to make a plugin out of it and move it out of the core. But I hypothesis is that no one is actually using the calendar. And if so then making a plugin out of it would be a waste of time which could be used on more pressing issues.
I think these groups of people would benefit from this idea and why:
Every Mautic user wondering what the Calendar menu item does and how it is useful. It is buggy and do not bring any value to marketers Iâm afraid. And it will speed up Mautic to remove some services that need booting.
Developers as they donât have to maintain code that is not used.
Any code or resources to support this idea:
I gladly delete the bundle for Mautic 5 branch myself.
Are you willing to work on this idea?:
It would be pleasure actually.
What skills and resources do you need to explore this further?
We actually use the calendar quite a lot within sales department. We would miss the calendar from end-user perspective.
From mine (developer´s perspective) in general I am not exactly happy about the current implementation of calendar. I actually had to apply some fixes on one instance in Calendar bundle just to make events visible.
My question is: Is there any replacement planned for it in Mautic 5? Thanks.
@mzagmajster I would be very interested in understanding how you are using this with the sales department and if you find the calendar reliable and useful. How are you dealing with the extra information added into the calendar with upcoming emails and campaign events ?
Hi @mikew the sales department likes calendar and says its useful for them. The thing is that events from other sources like campaign events and emails do not add that much of entries to the calendar to render it unusable.
So we are not really dealing with it, because we do not have to (yet), I guess.
Hi @mikew - I just created a couple weeks of campaigns, one for each day of the week and none appear on the calendar. Whatâs the point of a calendar if your future campaigns do not appear?
So I agree with you that it may as well be removed.
The added benefit is that the usability would improve because it would be one less distraction to new users.
I had issues with displaying the events. In my case it was because the max limit for events that can be loaded from database is set to 100. If you incresse the number, the events should display.
I think core team is not able to maintenance it anymore.
Then we can remove it and any company can pick it up, move to plugins and maintenance for marketplace (and earn some money for support/improve it).
It looks like the current state of the calendar is not helpful to anyone. It starts to be interesting when we increase the limit of events to appear in the calendar. But that heavily depends on how many events are present in the Mautic instance, right? You can increase it to 100. But what if you have 20 million such events in a month? You cannot load that many in the browser as it would run out of time or memory and such calendar wouldnât even load.
So fixing that problem for everyone wonât be easy. If there is a higher percentage of users using the calendar then we can extract it from the core and create a plugin installable by the Mautic Marketplace.
The decision we should make together is whether itâs worth investing the effort in making the plugin or whether the developerâs time should be spend rather on parts of Mautic that are being used by the majority of the Mautic users.
An as Zdeno suggests, the plugin can be made by someone who use it and want to maintain it. The thing is that I wouldnât want to make it a plugin under the Mautic organization because it is hardly usable. Plugins in the Mautic organization should be solid, stable with active maintainers and bring a good value to the users.
Summary of options:
Keep the calendar in Mautic core as is.
Extract it from the core and make a plugin out of it.
Delete it from the core with an option that someone from the community will make a plugin out of it and maintain it.
As a newbie here, this is interesting to read this conversation!
Personally I havenât found much use for the Calendar yet, although I did use it recently trying to inspect the steps in a dysfunctional campaign.
Idea: It could be a neat idea to have a calendar integration that sends relevant event and Contact info, syncing it with the personal calendar (eg. Gmail/Zoho) of the appropriate User/Owner for that Contact. A plugin or automation that handles that could be super useful to a sales team and valuable to whomever sold it.
Thatâs my two cents from the sidelines, whatever thatâs worth.
Quick background on me as I am quite new here, I use Mautic as the entry CRM/Email Marketing Automation Engine for our new clients that have never had a CRM before, so they can see how valuable it can be to their organization. I also have clients using a LOT of other CRM systems (Hubspot, Sharpspring, Zoho, Constant Contact, Mailchimp, Klaviyo etc etc) so I am privvy to how/why they have chosen those solutions.
One of the big ones is having an inbuilt booking system (Hubspot, Sharp, Zoho) for their sales team so all they need to do is send a link and their prospects can book a slot directly into their calendar (which is a massive time saver!). Another is task management where specific tasks can be set into the calendar in relation to specific prospects at specific times. Another is campaign management so we can see when specific marketing emails, blogs, articles, pages, messages etc will be sent out. Finally, I am going to mention integration with Google Calendar, Microsoftâs Calendars etc so that people can extract a daily schedule in one place on all of their devices easily.
The current implementation of the calendar can sort of do the task management part but without the integrations and the rest itâs extremely far behind the non-open source systems and the user experience is not good.
I agree with the idea of making it a plugin so that someone with a vested interest in maintaining it can take the reins and improve its overall usability.
We solved this by using an online calendaring solution, 10to8 in our case, integrated through a Make.com workflow to Mautic with the booking form iframed into our Wordpress site.
Emails are sent to the propect containing the booking link. They fill out the form and the data hits both mautic and the calendaring system. We also pull the calendaring data back to mautic to booking status.
One upvote to remove Calendar and wait for someone to implement a stable cross-platform plugin. Would be great to support caldav protocol to make it more independent of exchange-server etc. Also, adding tasks and assigning them to users / contacts down a sales pipeline would be grand in order to make it more CRM-like and avoid commercial products for SMUâs.
the calendar function is crucial to use it for daily tasks such as assigning events or todoâs (such as letâs say a scheduled call, zoom/webinar event, general action items) to both customers/prospect customers (i.e. on my email lists) as well as other team members (i.e. other users in Mautic) to their respective calendars (e.g. using independent caldav). You can then have a calendar app on your mobile phone and have your daily todoâs in there w/o the need to logging into mautic to see the calendar (pls let me know if Iâm overlooking somethin here).
If this works well (together with a slightly improved notes-section under âcontactsâ), this would make an external CRM redundant in quite some cases.
I would be willing to spend a little to have some additional CRM/calendar functions implemented, e.g. as plugin, in order to get rid of our âexternalâ CRM. Can you point me towards directions where to find someone to program this? Many thx.
