My idea is: Clean up the journey from website-visitor to installed instance.
A simple example as to why this matters: i was greeted with a notification that 4.0.1 is released with a link to 4.0.0 release page on github. This is great news but there are no instructions on how to proceed with the upgrade. No email, no forum post. Searching for “4.0.1” in the forums gives 0 result. The documentation pages upgrade section shows a really outdated version. How to do? Where to even find the documentation on how to upgrade from 3.x to 4.x? It’s buried somewhere, i know i have seen it. But i didn’t bookmark it and now I’ve spent 30 minutes looking for it without success.
The current state of documentation and the user journey on the website is mighty confusing and lacking. Which is very surprising for a product that is targeted at marketeers. Instinctively, i would expect this website to be an example of clarity and brilliance to “sell” Mautic. However, i am also used to run and part-take in FOSS project and i understand it’s not just a matter of expertise, but also that of (wo)manpower. Volunteer driven projects always struggle with team-members having a short stay on a project, which often hurts many parts of the project including the documentation part: a user begins working on something, then leaves, after what it’s hard to pick-up where things were left. Let alone to even know where to pick-up.
I think these groups of people would benefit from this idea:
Anyone showing a slight interest for the amazing Data-sovereign marketing automation tool that Mautic actually is.
Why I think they would benefit from this idea:
A clear journey from website, via doc to installation would be beneficial to all parts of the projects, because it could potentially attract more users, effectively making the maintaining of the doc easier for future releases. Which in turn will help anyone showing a slight interest for the amazing Data-sovereign marketing automation tool that Mautic actually is.
Any code or resources to support this idea:
Brainstorm with marketeers from the Mautic community on how to set-up the user-journey from the website, to the documentation leading to an installation of a Mautic instance. This journey should induce confidence in developers, marketeers and sysadmins alike. This is paramount for growing the user base. The brain-trust is here. The product is here (Mautic) and it’s Awesome! We “just” need to focus all of the content and clean up some mess.
Are you willing to work on this idea?:
yes
What skills and resources do you need to explore this further?
Support from the lead and the community.
Thanks for giving your feedback and we absolutely appreciate that things need to be improved here!
We do have an initiative underway which is improving some basic aspects of the install/upgrade process but we only have one person working on that part time.
We would absolutely love to have more people involved in helping us to tackle this, would you be up for getting things moving? Feel free to ping me on Slack (get an invite at Mautic Community On Slack) to chat further!
In answer to your specific question I have a PR to improve the docs on installing and upgrading which needs to be reviewed:
If you’d like to help with that, please click the ‘files’ section and then review the changes (in green) - if you think it’s all good then please click ‘Review Changes’ and leave a message with the radio set to ‘approve’. If you think there need to be changes, beside the line which needs changing click the plus icon that appears and you can suggest changes
Likewise if something should be added then please add that as a comment in the review! Once it is reviewed we can add this to the documentation for all.
Thanks again for raising your concerns, it’s really appreciated!
Thank you for raising these concerns and if you do not mind you can chat me on Slack and discuss together on how we can take things up from the marketing perspective. Although, we are short of volunteers but your contributions are highly welcomed.
