Ruth Cheesley

Mautic Project Lead (Campaign Studio)

Ruth is an Open Source advocate with over 18 years of experience using and contributing to many different projects. Having served on the Community Leadership Team of the Joomla! project and built a full-service digital agency, she now works as the Mautic Project Lead at Acquia, supporting the community who build and maintain the world’s first Open Source Marketing Automation platform. Ruth is a lover of cats, a keen runner and is based in the East of England.

Acquia open sources Custom Objects plugin to extend Mautic’s capabilities

May 23, 2022
3 minute read

Today we are delighted to share that we have completed the process of open sourcing the Custom Objects plugin, a proprietary extension which was developed by Mautic Inc. in 2018 and has been a part of Acquia’s Campaign Studio since the acquisition in 2019.

The Custom Objects plugin brings some much-needed functionality to community hosted Mautic installations which to date has only been possible with complex workarounds.

What does the Custom Objects plugin do?

The Custom Objects plugin allows users to create more many-to-many relational data tables to associate more items, such as products, orders or transactions, households, and more, with either a single contact or multiple contacts. For example, one family can have multiple cars from multiple manufacturers or with different models. This elaborates a 1:many relationship between the custom object (car) and the custom items (BMW, Porsche, etc).

These associations enable you to easily segment and market to your database, based on buying behavior or other interactions with your organization and its offerings.

Source: https://docs.acquia.com/campaign-studio/settings/custom-objects/

Why are we open sourcing the plugin?

We are in the process of reviewing all the plugins we have developed for customers in Campaign Studio, and determining how and when to make them available as open source plugins. Giving back to open source is part of Acquia’s DNA, and this marks the start of a process of developing a systematic approach to open sourcing our work when it’s appropriate to do so.

There was considerable demand for the Custom Objects plugin and the functionality which it brings to Mautic, and it ranked highly on our scoring system which meant we prioritized this plugin as our first to be released.

Over the coming months we are planning to open source more of the plugins we have developed, so watch this space for more updates!

How can Mautic users access the plugin?

The Custom Objects plugin is available to install from the Mautic Marketplace, and can also be found on GitHub.

You must be running Mautic 4.3.0 or higher to use the plugin, as there are many dependencies which were introduced in this release, necessary for using the Custom Objects plugin.

Where can users find the documentation?

Documentation for end-users on how to configure Custom Objects in Mautic can be found in the Acquia Campaign Studio Documentation. Developer-focused documentation can be found in the repository’s wiki.

Image: @tcsteh via Twenty20