Today we make available the first minor release in the 4.x series which includes features and improvements for both developers and marketers, in addition to bug fixes.
Below you will find details of the features, enhancements and bug fixes - for more detail and a full list of changes please refer to the Release Notes.
New features
Developer-facing changes
- If you are someone who likes to optimize your Mautic instance, you’ll appreciate this nice little feature. Thanks to this PR from now Mautic will report how long it took to create a segment.
- As a developer you’ll now be able to pick up more code errors before they even make it into Mautic, as we’ve increased the PHPSTAN rule level to 6 and implemented the baseline feature. All new features and bug fixes will need to pass this check, but if you need assistance with existing pull requests please ping John Linhart via Slack or GitHub.
- If you need to display custom data in the click counts table, you can do that thanks to this PR.
- If you need to extend the email form template (for example to create a new tab with additional fields) you can do that thanks to this PR.
- Have you ever needed to check exactly what was changed in activity timelines and been frustrated with having to go into the individual audit logs? Now, thanks to this PR, you can view the source and find the specific information in the HTML code as a comment.
End-user facing changes
- Now you can make your forms more intuitive with the new conditional form field selection. This has also been extended to provide support for country/state dependent fields - once a country is selected, irrelevant counties, regions, states and other administrative areas won’t show up if you’re using form fields mapped to the relevant Mautic fields. Read more about this feature under this PR and in the documentation here.
- Thanks to this PR you’ll be able to use tokens in the to; cc and bcc fields. This opens the way for brand new ways to automate email campaigns, especially if you use it for internal communication.
- Remember those anonymous contacts pinging non-existing pages on your Mautic install? It’s time to say goodbye to most of them. This PR will allow you to turn off tracking on 404 pages.
- Understanding campaign statistics was always a challenge for newcomers. One of the reasons why is because as the campaign evolves and changes, new values are added skewing the overall statistics. Mauticians struggled with an elegant solution for fixing this and keeping historical statistics intact. Finally this simple yet brilliant PR cuts the Gordian Knot by adding a date filter to the statistics view allowing marketers to observe campaign results of a certain timeframe, ignoring or focusing on certain changes to the campaign.
- Multi-select fields are the way to turn form checkboxes into manageable data in Mautic. Two new features let you manage them even easier. The first enhancement will let you add multiple multiselect values as default upon contact creation. The second one allows you to simply copy + paste a comma separated multi-select data into Mautic and save as multi-select by using a | separator.
- Your love and hate relationship with Focus items is getting closer to a happy ending. Now you are able to use better CSS on Focus items, making them prettier than ever. Read more about this PR here.
- Ever had a webhook or campaign fail and not get the notifications because the owner of the resource is out on vacation and not checking their emails? Now you can decide to provide specific email addresses which should be notified in the event of a webhook failure or campaign unpublishing, instead of only informing the owner of the resource. This has other implications, for example being able to ping you in a chat channel or raise a support ticket via the email alert.
- Importing contacts inevitably leads to wanting to view the contacts you just created or updated. Thanks to this PR, you can now click on a link in the column to go to a filtered list of contacts.
- Ever wanted to help test Mautic features and bug fixes? Now it’s even easier with the addition of support for Gitpod. Each new pull request will have a button in the description which you can click to open up a Mautic instance, ready made for you to test. Just log in with the default username and password, and get testing!
Bug fixes
There are six bug fixes in this release:
- Webhooks work again! In the past couple of weeks Webhooks in campaign steps took a long vacation and didn’t work. The holiday is over, campaign webhooks work again thanks to this PR.
- If you’re a webhook fan you’ll likely have had to check out the details page at some time to look through the logs. If the logs numbered in the millions, you would probably see our friend the Mautibot with an unhelpful 500 error! Now we will only display the latest 100 log entries on the details page of your webhook in Mautic, which will prevent such crashes happening in the future.
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Git and Composer-based installs will now get the most recent production assets thanks to this PR, so you won’t have to regenerate them. We’re working on a longer term fix for having this happen as part of the installation and upgrade in this environment, but for now when you update you’ll get the most recent CSS and JS files in the release. Note that this doesn’t impact installations from the zipped installation files, as these assets are automatically created in the production packages.
- A small bug in our GitHub Actions pipeline meant that one of the themes wasn’t correctly tagged in the last release. This has been addressed so you’ll now be able to install and update correctly using Composer.
- A bug with the reply-to field using the global sender address instead of a provided ‘from’ address when creating an email has been fixed. Now if you specify an email in the ‘from’ field and leave the ‘reply-to’ field blank, Mautic will use the ‘from’ email address as the ‘reply-to’ address by default.
- A bug with the SameSite cookie attribute has been fixed - this meant that there were some problems with cross-site tracking with Mautic, resulting in the cookies being blocked.
Want to see more features and bug fixes?
There were many more features and bug fixes that we had wanted to include, but unfortunately we did not have enough people helping to test them to allow us to include them in this release.
If you would like to see more features and bug fixes making their way into Mautic, now is the time to step up and help us with this ongoing task.
You don’t need to be technical (although if you are, we have plenty to keep you busy!), or even to have your own test instance - we now have a one-click button that allows you to open up a Mautic instance for testing. Anybody who uses Mautic can help, and even one hour of your time could mean the difference between a feature or bug fix making it into the next release or not.
Read more about how you can contribute in the Community Handbook.
Please join #mautic-4 on Slack and consider making some time to help give back to Mautic.
Here are the dates for the next releases:
4.1.1
Milestone: https://github.com/mautic/mautic/milestone/81
General Availability: 20th December 2021
4.1.2
Milestone: https://github.com/mautic/mautic/milestone/82
General Availability: 24th January 2022
4.2
Milestone: https://github.com/mautic/mautic/milestone/83
General Availability: 21st February 2022