Writing for Mautic

We appreciate your interest in contributing to Mautic. Improving existing content is an excellent way to begin contributing. We are always looking for people to help us with writing content for our documentation, marketing and communications, and our social media campaigns. We also have a lot of technical writing opportunities in the Mautic Community, including Mautic Knowledgebase, Mautic developers blog, and Mautic Developer Documentation.

Getting started with writing for Mautic

The first thing to do is to join #t-marketing channel on Mautic Community Slack and introduce yourself.

Finding a writing task

The Mautic low- and no-code projects board provides no/low-code tasks, including content and editorial work. To get involved, browse the board, select a task or issue that interests you, and leave a comment on it so that a team member can assign it to you.

Once you’ve been assigned to the task or issue, please check the writer’s brief which is attached as a Google Doc, located in Mautic Google Drive. The brief should explain what the article should include, the audience we are intending to target, and some useful resources to help you get started.

Please write the content in the Google Doc. When you’re ready to have it reviewed, drop a comment on the GitHub issue and let the team know in Slack.

Please note that we do check to ensure that articles are not copied from other locations without due credit, so please do not copy/paste chunks from other websites as your content will be rejected.

It helps if you can provide an image to use with the article. This must be royalty free or a license to use the image be granted to the Mautic Community. We use Unsplash and Pixabay to find royalty free images.

Mautic Community Blog Writer & Editorial Guidelines

Content Guidelines

  • All posts must be in English, unless posted in a specific international area. If posting in an international area, please use the language of that area, and not English.

  • Do not discuss illegal activities. Our servers are hosted in the USA and so it is subject to US law. Please do not expose us to any unnecessary legal liability.

  • Use your own words. If you wish to use the words of somebody else, quote them, citing the source. Plagiarism is unethical and is illegal in many countries.

  • Do not use any copyrighted material unless it’s released under a free use license such as Creative Commons or compatible. If such copyrighted material is used, proper credit/attribution must be given.

  • In case you use copyrighted material that demands authorization from the author, make sure you have that authorization before you post.

  • Do not link to any site that contains adult content, sexually oriented material or might otherwise be considered offensive. Any post containing an inappropriate link will be deleted and the poster will receive a warning.

  • Do not propose/link to any site that contains warez (‘stolen’ software)/copyrighted software/materials that can be downloaded illegally.

  • No commercial advertising is permitted. This includes advertising of any services and/or products not fully compliant with the GPL license.

    In regards to this, you can post links towards your website at the end of the blog and you can write a sentence that leads to your website. For example, “This information can be found on <this link>” or “Read more in this article in <your native language>.”

    Any posts deemed to be self promotion, advertising, or spam can and will be removed. NO SPAM - NO ADVERTISING. For example, posting and making excessive, inappropriate and unnecessary references to your products and websites is self promotion.

  • This site is centered on Mautic, Open Source software and other Marketing and Development matters. It is not a place to promote ideological, religious, or political matters. All such discussions will be deleted.

Disclosure of Compensated Relationships

The US Government Federal Trade Commission has rules requiring the disclosure of any compensated relationship - employment, for pay, or in return for free/discounted products and/or services - that an author has when they review/evaluate/recommend a product or service.

The Mautic Community websites fall under these FTC rules.

“When recommending a plugin or other product to help a user solve their issue, you must disclose any affiliations you may have with the company or group that authors that particular product. This includes, but is not limited to: any paid or non-paid relationships past or present, receiving any promotional products or services, or any other similar information.”

Article Submission Guide
Audience

The international Mautic community includes everyone, from first time users to experienced developers. We also talk to marketers that may be using other platforms, but that might want to migrate to Mautic once they get to know our tool a little better. All submissions should be provided in US English.

Word count

For most subjects, we are looking for articles consisting of approximately 400 to 650 words, with 500 words as a good target.

More in-depth articles will be considered depending on the subject matter. If you are interested in writing about a subject that is extremely long, consider breaking it up into a series of multiple articles. If this is the case, please submit a summary of your subject.

Submission deadline

Please submit articles at least seven calendar days before the expected publish date. This allows time for editorial review, amendments and publishing. Also, please be available to review any questions or suggestions that you may get before publishing your article.

What Mautic looks for

Successful article submissions will have the following in common:

  • The subject matter is interesting and relevant to the Mautic Community audience and marketers, and has a positive angle.

  • The articles present sufficient ‘stand alone’ information for the reader. This means that a high level of experience or knowledge is not required to understand the article. Including educational/explanatory links to other resources is encouraged.

  • Authors are members of the Mautic community, for example, users, commentators, forum members, developers, documentation writers, etc.

What to avoid

  • Important: all article must abide by our Content Guidelines;

  • Articles that do not have a direct connection to Mautic;

  • Self-promotional articles. For example: an article about a plugin or service written by the developer themselves, or an employee. Even if the plugin or service in question is free, the article will not be published;

  • Articles that draw attention to issues/problems/concerns. Mautic has other channels for that, but that isn’t the purpose of the Community Blog;

  • Articles that are too advertorial in style - rather than blatantly plug the writer’s own business, articles should employ the ‘attraction’ marketing principle, for instance, the author’s expertise is evident, but not obtrusive. For example, instead of writing about ‘Why you need a marketing expert’ or ‘What a marketing expert can do for you’, an article on ‘Best practices for marketing’ would work better;

  • Press Releases submitted as articles;

  • Articles that are too similar to existing topics - check for similar content on Mautic community blog;

  • Articles that require too much editing.

Our expectation is for articles submitted to be as ‘publication ready’ as possible. Any submissions requiring significant editing may not be considered. This could include overly long articles or previously published/written items which require excessive modifications. Previously published/written items are fine, provided that, prior to submission, the author has made the necessary edits in accordance with these guidelines.

Articles which are not in accordance with these guidelines may be rejected.

Interaction with readers

Articles will also allow readers to add comments, and we definitely favor articles that will generate constructive discussion. The Mautic Community Blog’s most popular articles will likely succeed in encouraging discussions with readers, so keep this in mind when writing your article.

Pre-launch article submission process

Share all article pitches in the #t-marketing channel on Slack.

After submitting your pitch, the team reviews it and decides whether to move it into the ‘forming’ stage or directly into the ‘writing’ stage. In the ‘forming’ stage, you may need to provide additional information, research, or background details to help assess its suitability for the Community Blog.

Once your pitch moves to the ‘writing’ stage, you’re responsible for drafting the content within the agreed time. Make sure you meet the draft due date and submit the completed article on time.

Style Guide summary

  • All spelling should be in US English.

  • Write numbers one to nine as words and numbers 10 and above as numerals.

  • Where possible, avoid mentioning specific companies or organizations in your article unless it is relevant to your subject.

  • If you want to emphasize a phrase or word, use italics rather than underlining. Readers assume underlined text is hyperlinked.

  • Titles of books should be presented in italics.

  • Our preferred date format is month/day/year, for example, January 1, 2011.

  • Write ‘20 to 30’, not ‘20-30’.

  • For most subjects, we are looking for articles consisting of approximately 400 to 650 words, with 500 words as a good target.

  • The style and tone should be clear, concise, positive, and upbeat.

  • Sign your article using some variation of the template: “<Author name> is a <job title> at <company name>. You can follow <pronouce> on <social networks/GitHub repository> and read more of <pronounce> <concentration area of knowledge> on <external company/personal blog URL>.”

  • A more complete style guide will be published soon.

Questions?

If you have questions about submitting an article or other aspects of the Mautic Community Blog, please post on the Mautic Community Forums or on the #blog channel in Mautic Community Slack.

References

This is based on the excellent work done by the Joomla project.

Technical writers

If you’re a technical writer or interested in creating content for a technical audience, explore tasks on the Mautic low- and no-code projects board. There are opportunities to write for the Knowledgebase, including tutorials, best practices, and examples that show how to accomplish specific tasks in Mautic.

You can also improve and update the existing content in the End-User Documentation. Start with any section that seems unclear, outdated, or could benefit from additional explanation or context.

If you’re reading a page of documentation and thinking, “I wish this page included more information” or “This is not the manner in which these function,” then that is an excellent place to start contributing.

We can also feature deep dive technical articles on the developers blog, including code examples and demo applications.

The Developer Documentation is always looking for new contributors, so if you’d like to help by adding more examples, updating and improving the content or making suggestions for improvement, please let us know.

If there are no open issues covering the area you’d like to write on, please contact the Marketing or Education Team on Slack and explain what you’d like to write.

Work in the public domain

Unless there is significant reason not to, we default to being open and transparent. We work in the open, usually on the shared Mautic Google Drive. This ensures that if - for whatever reason - someone is unable to complete a task, it is easy for another contributor to pick up where they left off. It also means we can always find previous work that had been done if it needs to be re-used in the future.

Please always ensure that you upload your work at regular (ideally daily) intervals. You can use the prefix of WIP-filename to indicate that it is currently in progress.

Update regularly

Please provide regular updates on the issue. If you can’t complete the task, leave a comment on the issue or let your Team Lead know so someone else can take it over.

We totally understand that life happens and it’s easy to take on too much. No judgement at all. We try to be respectful of each other by ensuring we give as much notice as possible if we’re not going to be able to fulfil a task assigned to us.