Nick Veenhof is the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) at Dropsolid. Nick is an active open source contributor and not just to Mautic - he has also been contributing to Drupal for over 15 years. Dropsolid is one of the community partners that sponsor Mautic. At Dropsolid they create a digital experience ecosystem for customer-personalizing websites and newsletters.

Why Contribute to Mautic?

Using Mautic, Nick discovered that there are things to be improved on, and he made his first contribution to the Mautic 3 codebase. He immediately noticed that there wasn’t a smooth workflow when updating Mautic and things could possibly break if you don’t know what you’re doing. Nick’s desire for contributing to Mautic, from a developer's point of view, was to make Mautic maintainable and sustainable.

In order to dramatically improve the process (and help the knowledge-gap within the community), he took it upon himself with some other contributors to make Mautic compatible with Composer. He was the major contributor to get the initial pieces of Composer working within Mautic 3.

Contributing to Mautic 4

In Mautic 4 there was a Strategic Initiative to re-architect how Mautic is put together and make these composer packages work absolutely cohesively.

Most people update Mautic with the click of a button or a large series of command line instructions. Now, you can update Mautic with a simple Composer command!

Is this your first time hearing about this? Are you wondering what Composer is all about? Let us dissect it in simple terms. 

Simply said, Composer manages pieces of code that Mautic depends on. These pieces of code are called ‘packages.’ All these packages can be downloaded and put in a kind of folder to be integrated with Mautic - but that does not mean it is updated and maintainable.

The key that is unlocked with Composer is to bring together all the packages that a project relies on from external sources and also make sure that when there are new external project updates and security fixes, they are also reflected in the Mautic installation automatically.

Why Composer in Mautic 4

As Mautic matures and attracts more in-project contributions and custom development work by third-parties, Composer is the only way to go. It also helps to test new features in a development environment before deploying them into staging or production.

An example of the power that Composer brings to Mautic is the foundation that has been built in Mautic 4 to create a Marketplace where it will be easy to install add-ons from a pool of different and exciting new features. Another example is our new Email Builder, which is fully integrated into a Mautic installation using Composer.

Give it a Try

Developers can try it out and spin up projects under the mautic/recommend-project using a single Composer command where you can download, configure, and do all specific to Composer and gives you a usable and secure installation of Mautic from the start. Take a few minutes to explore and see the difference between the old method versus using Composer - there is no functional difference.

You Can Also Contribute

Right now, we can use YOUR help with documenting the upgrade flow for people that are currently not using Composer in their Mautic instance.

Thank You, Nick

We’d like to take a moment to thank Nick for his valued volunteer contributions into leading the monumental effort to Composer-ify Mautic and for taking the time to be interviewed for this article. We appreciate your contribution to the community and for the time spent, resources and zeal.

You want to contribute to the Mautic Community? You can learn more about contributing here.