Welcome to the project idea page for GSoD 2022.
Mautic was the first free & Open Source Email Marketing Automation platform. It was created by DB Hurley and launched in 2014 as an Open Source project under the GPL v3 license.
Mautic is a tool developed by a community of developers and marketers, which allows you to fully personalize the digital experience of visitors to your resources. The software has all the essential features like lead management, campaign management, contacts and emails and responsive email creation. Mautic also has features that you can not find in all emailing solutions, such as creating lead generating landing pages and registration forms.
The Mautic Community is a worldwide distributed team of volunteers who are passionate about Mautic, Marketing Automation, and Open Source technologies. We come together to build, improve and share Mautic, united by our belief in empowering organizations with the tools they need to deliver world-class automation and personalized experiences to their customers.
This Open Source project is available in more than 65+ languages and over 200,00 organizations already trust Mautic.
Installing, configuring, and using Mautic's features is the common goal of our users who visit the documentation available at the Mautic website. The documentation, however, lacks up-to-date examples, images, and other necessary information. It's difficult for our users to get started because of the steep learning curve, and they have a hard time understanding what they can accomplish with Mautic. As a result of this issue, we are losing a lot of new users and seeing an increasing amount of questions in the community.
Our existing documentation structure also needs to be improved, through Google Season of Docs, we aim to work on identifying the correct solutions for these problems and create documentation will be more beneficial to our users so that they'll be more satisfied.
We seek to move the documentation to a new platform, and in that process restructure the contents and update the information in the documentation. We use sphinx for our documentation effort. The technical writer working on this project will:
- Organize and structure information to make it easy for a user to get started.
- Suggest ways to make the documentation streamlined
- Move the existing Documentation to its new platform
- Update the out-of-date information with recent information on the releases we have
- Incorporate feedback from testers(volunteers) and the Mautic community
- Work with the Mautic team to test the documentation end to end and identify areas for improvement
- Update the documentation with relevant examples, screenshots and break processes down into easy steps
- Update the style guide.
- Make sure the information contained in the documentation is correct.
Our contributors currently use GitHub issues, Mautic Slack channel and Mautic Forums to raise issues about the documentation. We would consider the project successful if, after the publication of the new documentation:
- Increase in traffic to the documentation as more people are finding, using, sharing and understanding the documentation.
- In the support forum's Q&A area, the number of users getting started questions decreases by 20%.
- Increase of 15% in the number of pull requests from new contributors.
The project itself will take approximately six months to complete, this would be broken down into 20-30hrs per week. Once the tech writer is hired, we'll spend a month on tech writer orientation, then organizing content and creating documentation structure. The last few months will be spent on creating the documentation.
| Dates | Action Items |
|---|---|
| May | Orientation( Understanding the project, what is expected, discuss ways to ensure success at the completion of the program |
| June- July | Reviewing the existing documentation to be moved to the new platform, organising content and creating documentation structure. |
| July- September | Create documentation |
| October | Project completion |
| Budget item | Amount | Running Total | Notes/justifications |
|---|---|---|---|
| Technical writer/s audit, update, test, and publish new Mautic documentation | 10,500 | 10,500.00 | |
| Volunteer stipends | 1,500 | 12,000 | 3 volunteer stipends x 500 each |
| Project t-shirts (5 t-shirts) | 200 | 12,200 | Design and print T-Shirt for participants and volunteers |
| Administration costs | 800 | 13,000.00 | Administration expenses ($174 for OysterHR contract, $500 toward attending next in-person conference, misc expenses) |
| TOTAL | | 13,000.00 | |
Mautic currently has technical writers and volunteers working on documentation. These technical writers are responsible for scoping, planning and working to create documentation for new releases and move Mautic to a new documentation site support..
We create content in RST, and use the GitHub flow to review content via PRs before publishing this content to the Mautic documentation site. We have a well-documented process of identifying, prioritizing and creating content that will be beneficial to technical writers working with us in the Season of Docs.
Mautic has applied for the Google season of docs program in 2020. We were delighted with the progress made by both of our technical writers who were new to Mautic and quickly jumped in to get started on their projects. Swati and Favour have both made substantial contributions during their projects and the Mautic Community has benefitted from their skills and enthusiasm for improving our documentation. Favour who is currently a mentor has also participated in Google Summer of Code 2019 as a student and Google Code-In as a mentor.