It’s been a long journey to get to this point, but today we’re excited to share that the Mautic 5 alpha release has now been released! The Product Team published the pre-release on June 26th and is excited to hear back from the community with your feedback from testing.

⚠️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 4, 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 5 and supports PHP 8.1, but it also brings several user-facing changes and exciting news for developers. Read on for more information.

User-facing changes in the Mautic 5 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.

Transaction emails and engagement profile

One of the major changes brought about by the Mautic 5 Alpha release is that transactional emails will now be sent even if the contact was flagged ‘do not contact’ (DNC). That means that even if your leads have unsubscribed from newsletters or marketing messages, if you need to send them important communications about their account they’ll be able to receive those transactional emails through Mautic. Such transaction emails will no longer have an unsubscribe header.

Marketers will also be able to see how each contact is engaging with the marketing campaigns. An overview of the contact’s email engagement statistics will be shown on their profile.

Tag reports and stages enhancements

Long asked for, the Stage condition is now available when building campaigns. Moreover, Stages can now be exported in a Contact export.

If you also use Tags along with Stages to manage your Contacts, here's some more big news: you can now filter Reports by Tags.

And so much more

Here are some more news that you may have been long waiting to see:

• A segment dependency tree now shows segments that have dependencies on other segments and warns you if you have multiple dependencies for the same segment
• Mailto: links can now be tracked as if they were a regular link
• Emails and pages can now use the {today} token
• Significant speed improvements on the de-duplicate task
• Significant optimization of the webhooks queue table
• Significant performance improvements in application load time

Plugins removed from the core

As end-users, changes in Mautic 5 begin at the installation, as some plugins were removed from Mautic core – like Pipedrive and Citrix. Not to worry, though, you can still install them separately, along with all other Plugin Marketplace options. Read the release notes for more information.

The Froala assets are now disabled by default. Yet, once again, marketers that use the legacy email or page builder can enable them.

The LinkedIn plugin has been removed, as it has not been functional since LinkedIn deprecated the version of the API which it used. We don’t currently have an alternative third-party plugin to replace it.

Mailer, SMTP, and send email configuration

By migrating from the Swift Mailer (discontinued) to the Symfony Mailer library, Mautic 5 also implements some substantial changes to the way that Mautic sends emails.

After installing the Mautic 5 alpha release, you can now configure the email transport – whichever it may be. Mautic now uses a specific way of providing the connection details for Email transports to interpret, which is called a Data Source Name, or DSN settings. Please read more in the documentation. From there, any transport you use can be configured from a single interface.

Developer-facing changes

Overall, the changes in Mautic 5 are moving Mautic closer to Symfony’s standards and best practices.

We have implemented the following in Mautic 5.0 alpha:

• Autowiring and autoconfiguration for PHP services. Developers finally don’t have to update config.php files when adding PHP services or changing dependencies of the existing services.
• JavaScript libraries are being installed and versioned via NPM instead of using hard-coded JS files, making it easier to update in the future.
• More Rector rules were added so once you start updating your Mautic plugins to Mautic 5, it will do some of the refactoring for you.
• Index_dev.php is dead. Long live the env.local file! The environment (dev, prod, test) and debug (on, off) options are now configurable in the env.local file rather than accessing via index_dev.php.
• All the PHP templates were converted into Twig as the PHP templating engine was removed in Symfony 5.

Please check the UPGRADE-5.0.md file for extensive documentation on developer-facing changes.

Download Mautic 5 alpha and help speed up the releases

All these exciting new features 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 5 into the General Availability version.

The General Availability release of Mautic 5.0 is scheduled to be released on September 26, 2023, and with your contribution, we believe we can release it on that day.

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>
• Help us with completing the work on the new end-user and developer documentation sites.

https://github.com/mautic/mautic/blob/5.x/UPGRADE-5.0.md

https://github.com/mautic/mautic/releases/tag/5.0.0-alpha1

Updated docs: https://mautic-documentation.readthedocs.io/en/5.x/overview/overview.html