Of course we cannot always share details about our work with customers, but nevertheless it is nice to show our technical achievements and share some of our implemented solutions.
In the world of open source CRM's, Mautic is one of the most widely used software. It has a nice user interface, an easy to use contact management and the newsletter function (including reports) works great!
At Infiniroot we have been offering hosted Mautic as a service for roughly 3 years now, so that customers can focus on the CRM itself rather than on the technical stuff and software updates. We even sent in a pull request for an older release (Mautic 3.2.1) a while ago - a small way to contribute back to the project.
You can order a hosted Mautic (dedicated) server in our order process.
The release of the new version, Mautic 5, has been ongoing for a couple of months already. The first pre-release (alpha) was made available in June 2023, but it took until the new year to get the final version out.
From our side, we have finished our automated Mautic 5.0 CRM setup in December 2023 - to be ready when the new 5.x version would be available.
Mautic 5.0.0 was officially released 3 days ago, on January 9th 2024 (UTC). It is now considered stable and therefore can replace the previous Mautic versions.
One very important note though: If you are relying on the calendar, embedded in Mautic 3.x and 4.x, be ready to shed a tear. The embedded calendar has been removed in Mautic 5.x.
Some bugs are only found after an official release, when the wide mass starts updating (yes, there are alpha and release candidates available for months, but at the end the "real users" always come after the official general availability of a software). Just a day later, Mautic 5.0.1 was released.
An update to Mautic 5.0.1 however results in an error:
An exception occurred while executing a query: SQLSTATE[42S01]: Base table or view already exists: 1050 Table 'point_groups' already exists at /var/www/mautic/vendor/doctrine/dbal/src/Driver/API/MySQL/ExceptionConverter.php:45, Doctrine\\DBAL\\Driver\\PDO\\Exception(code: 1050): SQLSTATE[42S01]: Base table or view already exists: 1050 Table 'point_groups' already exists at /var/www/mautic/vendor/doctrine/dbal/src/Driver/PDO/Exception.php:28, PDOException(code: 42S01): SQLSTATE[42S01]: Base table or view already exists: 1050 Table 'point_groups' already exists at /var/www/mautic/vendor/doctrine/dbal/src/Driver/PDO/Connection.php:70)","command":"doctrine:migrations:migrate --quiet --no-interaction","message":"An exception occurred while executing a query: SQLSTATE[42S01]: Base table or view already exists: 1050 Table 'point_groups' already exists"}
The bug was mentioned in multiple issues (#13192 and #13193) on GitHub and also in the Mautic community forums. The bug was quickly identified and fixed with a patch in pull request #13195, which, basically said, changes database index detection to foreign key detection inside the database.
After manually applying the mentioned patch, the update to Mautic 5.0.1 was successful.
An alternative to manually patching the code is to simply wait for the next release, 5.0.2, which will contain the patch and the update should therefore run without any error.
As mentioned in the beginning, Infiniroot has been offering hosted Mautic since 2021. We've started off with a manual installation of Mautic 3.1.x for a single customer and have since developped an automated setup for Mautic 4.x and since last December also for Mautic 5.x.
The goal of a hosted Mautic? You focus on the CRM itself, managing contacts, creating newsletters and reports, etc. And the geeks at Infiniroot focus on the technical stuff under the hood, such as Mautic database and PHP compatibility, cron jobs, software updates, system patching, additional security, etc.
Get in touch with us now, if you'd like to know more - or order a hosted Mautic server with dedicated resources on our website.