We previously released a revised schedule for the Mautic 5 release in October where we shared that we had hoped to release early testing versions in November with a General Availability release in January.

We haven’t met those proposed dates, and here’s why.

What is taking so long with releasing Mautic 5?

In the previous versions of the framework that underpins Mautic – Symfony – two templating engines were supported: PHP and Twig.

Mautic has been built using the PHP templating engine – it’s familiar for developers, and provides more flexibility. However, this engine was officially deprecated in Symfony 4.3 and has been removed in Symfony 5. This means that we have to migrate all of our existing templates over from the PHP to the Twig engine.

This might sound easy, but our best guess suggested that this would mean over 700 files need to be updated, with many files requiring others to be updated first, as they were dependencies.

What do we need to do to release Mautic 5 faster?

As at writing this blog post, the product team channel has been working every week during the Open Source Friday but until recently, a small team of volunteers now work daily to get Mautic 5 ready for alpha-release and there are still a couple of outstanding tasks and some need reviews before they can be merged.

• Remove UI based upgrade TPROD-341
• Get Mautic working on Symfony 5 TPROD-342
• Remove support for PHP 7.4 and implement support for PHP 8.1 TPROD-345

The following needs review to get them merged:

• LeadBundle – Import
• Add Symfony Mailer Only
• DynamicContentBundle: migrate views from PHP Engine to Twig
• NotificationBundle – Mobile – Convert PHP Templates to Twig Templates
• NotificationBundle – Web – Convert PHP Templates to Twig Templates
• LeadBundle – Import #11814

You can find our more information on GitHub Roadmap to 5.0-alpha release

How you can contribute

You do not need to be a Developer to test new features that are planned for Mautic 5. Here is how you can contribute as a Tester and we encourage you joining our #t-product on Slack, if you are not on Mautic Slack you can request an invite.

Together with your contribution we can make Mautic 5 Alpha Release possible by the end of February 2023.