Idea Proposals for Google Summer of Code

By Alan Hartless · PUBLISHED February 17, 2016 · UPDATED February 17, 2016

We recently announced that Mautic is applying for this year's Google Summer of Code. How exciting! This is an incredible opportunity for students and organizations alike to contribute to the global Open Source community.

Part of the application process is to present a list of ideas that, if accepted into the program, students can write proposals for how they would best bring that idea to fruition. The process is brilliant on Google's part. Not only do the students have an opportunity to refine their technical, team building, and general communication skills; they also are able to improve and demonstrate their critical thinking to come up with a solution to a given idea and also their professional skill to publicly present it.

The team looked back on the feedback given from the community and came up with three ideas that seemed to be in high demand and would bring great additions to Mautic's feature-set.

All of the following will require knowledge in PHP, HTML, Javascript, and basic SQL with emphasis on specific languages as noted in the ideas. It will help to have experience in Symfony and Doctrine but is not required.

1. Magento Integration

Magento is one of the most popular open source eCommerce solutions so it makes perfect sense that Mautic should be able to integrate with it! Leveraging Magento’s API, Mautic should be able to sync customer information as leads, track the lead’s ordering history, and detect abandoned carts.

Mautic should be able to use that information to segment leads based on products purchased, recent activity (i.e. placed an order within last X weeks or have not placed an order in X months), and order statistics (i.e. spent $1000 in last 1 month).

In addition to segmentation, Mautic should also be able to use campaigns to send dynamic emails that include abandoned cart products (with images) along with emails that up-sell, cross-sell, and reorder purchased products.

Finally, Mautic should have eCommerce specific reporting such as correlating revenue with specific campaigns.

2. Custom WYSIWYG Editor and Improved Builders

Mautic currently uses a combination of CKEditor in full-page mode for creating custom HTML landing pages and emails. It also has a custom-built drag-and-drop “builder” to build themed landing pages and emails. As much as we love CKEditor, it doesn’t meet all of Mautic’s needs.

Thus, we would like to see a simple, powerful, and beautiful UI for building landing pages and emails that doesn’t depend on the end-user knowing web programming languages. But it should still give the power user or developer the option to directly edit the HTML. It needs to support both “free-style” and file-based themes.

It should include drag-and-drop elements such as image, text, table, lead profile information, forms, and other Mautic tokens. There should also be a simple and beautiful WYSIWYG editor for text and a file manager for images.

Finally, it needs the option to add stylesheets and javascript files to the tag without having to manually manipulate the HTML. A strong design eye and skill in Javascript will be required for this idea.

3. Javascript Tracking with Heat Mapping

Mautic currently tracks website activity using a script generated tracking pixel. This method is limited to server values and whatever is appended to the image src as query parameters. Thus, Mautic needs a more powerful and flexible way to handle lead tracking using Javascript. This project should at least bring configurable page tracking (URL, title, etc), event tracking (clicks, downloads, video plays, etc.), and device tracking (device type, screen size, OS, browser, etc). Using the click tracking data, it would be great to include a heat mapping feature to see where end-users are most active on a website. Some backend coding will be needed so knowledge in PHP is required in addition to Javascript.

Comment

Mike
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That's awesome that Mautic might be participating in Summer of Code. Love the idea proposal for heat mapping. That would be a really cool addition to Mautic.
nick
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IP lookup to fill-in the database. What would make Mautic very powerful and skip expensive paid solution cost gap for many I think is calling a known reliable IP database and slicing up the subscription for small responsible marketers as the tech can get scary if misused. Here's what I'm thinking: VisiStat -hook into. Not sure on the B2C reliability, but should be good for B2B. Least expensive access to this data I've seen at about $50/mon. Think it's mostly a JigSaw - LinkedIn call on data. Been playing with Charlie App in beta got me thinking, accuracy for me on e-mail guesses has been spotty. NeuStar IP Intelligence Package- believe Rapportive and a lot of others pull data from them. $.012 per query I think. If someone built a tool that trafficked a single subscription to many Mautic users calls, paid for the bulk access, could add a fee on top, bet a good recurring business for someone or Mautic itself to keep this going healthy amongst us small business users and devs who can't afford the advanced packages or our lower visit volumes. Data always needs to be maintained, honest recurring revenue stream. Think many of us would be more than happy paying 2cents per with a duplicate cap for returning users to help close data gaps with requesting form fill from users. DemandBase Data Cloud - $40-$50k blanket access I think. TowerData - seems bit outdated but was a player I did a lot of research into this not long ago looking for a solution used by bigger cos. I have other providers I vetted awhile ago. This could all be effectively white labeled by many small devs serving small biz. Think many of us paid for poor lists more than once. Saw a featured contributor on here Mr. Nguyen mention what I only saw one company recently doing think in Beta and coined "Programmatic Direct Mail" seems what he's interested in. This is responsible marketing as not just blasting junk mail. Many of these IP databases may be able to enable this additional idea of direct mail followup with an address guess. Having done a lot of old skool direct in past, paying someone for something experimental on a "CPC basis" for a mailing doesn't make sense this stage. But may be worth playing around with even small biz if you know how to work batches through USPS cost effectively. Some ideas. Thought would be great to explore as Summer of Code project. Hope I'm making sense with my stunted sentences. I can dig out a few more data sources I have notes somewhere on. About Me - Experienced former big co product and marketing manager bootstrapping small event business where large percent of ticket sale is charity. Lots of challenges ...ever look at todays ticketing solutions and at a $12 ticket price keeping it low overall fees for attendees? Imagine if movie theatre gave $1 +cc fee + service fee each sale. Kills the business. Been watching Mautic, above is what I'd love to see and shouldn't be too difficult to implement as there are lookup tools similar pulling data for set limit or beta for free. Effectively you'd be a reseller of the data to Mautic partners effectively white labeling for their clients or in-house business. Thought I'd put it out there somewhere. Love to see someone build this, and unlike many other projects, it'd generate revenue much like say a merchant processor does service-leadgen-client interface as added revenue channel for the data warehouse. They don't want to deal with us small fries. All the best.