Today we're delighted to share that Mautic 6.0.0-alpha Orion Edition has been released.
⚠️ IMPORTANT NOTE:
This is a pre-release, which means it should never be used in a production environment. It will not have an upgrade path from Mautic 5, and there will not be an upgrade path to future releases. Please only use it in testing environments, and report back your findings.
The major release focuses mainly on a major update to Symfony 6, but it also brings several user-facing changes and changes for developers.
It's important to remember that Mautic 6 is a shorter bridging release, meaning that 6.0.0-General Availability will be the last release containing features until 7.0 is released at the end of 2025, or earlier if the minimum required changes are contributed and tested sooner. Read more about the upcoming releases in our recent blog post.
Read on for more information about what's in the 6.0.0-alpha release.
User-facing changes in the Mautic 6 alpha release
It doesn't hurt to remind you once again that an Alpha release is not ready for production yet and should be used for testing purposes only. The purpose of a pre-release is that you can simulate real usage with a real tool, testing the things which are important for your business so that any bugs can be identified and fixed beforehand.
Improving tooltip help and guidance
More improvements coming from the UX/UI Tiger Team in this release include improving the tooltips and contextual help for the settings page, explaining to users what each field does and what formats are expected. Here's a before and after:
| Before | After |
|---|---|
Improving user experience with Dynamic Web Content
One of my personal favourites, this release features a vastly improved user experience for Dynamic Web Content slot generation, allowing you to generate the precise code required for embedding it within your website, including adding default content. You can grab the syntax commonly used for plugins (including being able to switch between square and curly braces) and for the plain HTML code.
Improving layout of tables and batch action features
If you've updated to 5.2 you'll have noticed we've dramatically improved the layouts of tables, and with 6.0.0-alpha we've got some more enhancements coming for you, this time focused on improving the batch functions. They're now moved to the toolbar instead of being hidden under the 'three dot menu' in a much more intuitive layout.
Report on your focus items
We now have a new report source, called Focus stats. This allows you to create a report which includes the following data from focus items: name, url, interaction, page hits, unique hits, description, focus type, style. This is super useful to keep track of how your focus items are performing.
New campaign email charts: weekday and hour based metrics
Have you ever wanted to see a chart which showed you how your emails within a campaign were performing by day or by hour? Thanks to this new PR we've now got an extra tab on the campaign which shows your email statistics.
Mark fields as read-only on forms
When showing a Mautic form, sometimes you might want to have certain fields 'read-only' - such as the user's email address - so that they can only fill out the fields you require. Thanks to this new feature, you can now set a field to be read only.
Removal of gated video
Gated video used a very outdated, unsupported library and only worked with the legacy builder which is going to be removed by the time we get to 6.0-General Availability. Therefore, the gated video feature has been removed from Mautic. If developers would like to build this for GrapesJS, please make a PR for the core team to review!
Developer-facing changes
With any major Mautic release we always try to remove old code, and bump up support to the next Symfony version. This means that developers are going to need to make changes to their code in order to support Mautic 6.x.
Please check the 6.0-upgrade file for all the information you'll need - please start updating your plugins in readiness for the General Availability release in March.
Some key things to note from this release:
- PHPSTAN and Rector are now updated to v2
- There has been extensive removal of deprecated code and refactoring
- Mautic now uses Symfony's Authentication system which replaces the Guard component
- Several components which did not work properly with Mautic's global search which was overhauled in 5.2 are now implemented
Download Mautic 6 alpha and help speed up the releases
All these exciting new features and code improvements now need to be extensively tested so they can get into the hands of our users as soon as possible.
As an open source project, the Mautic Community is the foundation of our progress, so join us today and help speed up the release of Mautic 6 into the General Availability version.
The General Availability release of Mautic 6.0 is scheduled to be released on 24th March 2025, with a Beta release on 24th February and Release Candidate version on 10th March. With your contribution, we'll make those deadlines.
Here is what you can do to help:
- Each Friday we will be having our usual Open Source Friday community sprints, a great way to have mentored onboarding to get started with contributing to Mautic. Join us on Slack and head over to #new-contributors if you’d like to get started, or jump right into any of the teams, whose channels start with #t-<team name>
- Check the features, enhancements, refactoring and bug fixes which are slated for release in the Beta and Release Candidate, and help us by testing them. Check our docs on testing - which can almost always be done locally or using Gitpod in the browser by any user of Mautic. Don't forget to leave a formal review, that counts as a contribution to Mautic!
- Help us with completing the updates needed for the end-user and developer documentation by joining #t-education on Slack. We have regular onboarding calls to help you get started. There's everything from updating screenshots to reviewing our code examples, something for everyone!
Useful resources
https://github.com/mautic/mautic/blob/6.x/UPGRADE-6.0.md - developer-facing changes
https://github.com/mautic/mautic/releases/tag/6.0.0-alpha - 6.0.0-alpha release
This is a companion discussion topic for the original entry at https://www.mautic.org/blog/community/mautic-6-here-alpha-release-ready-you-start-testing