The latest Mautic release update to 2.12 went seamlessly.  Like any system, however, you discover something that didn’t seem to cause a problem before.  This issue isn’t a bug, it’s just one of those snags you don’t catch until you get down to the level of testing you didn’t reach before.  The “Import Contacts” tool is one of those times when I discovered that if you select “Import in Background” instead of direct through the browser you will wait and nothing will import.  The reason isn’t obvious but I suspected it was because a CRON job was missing.

I assumed this was triggered simply when the user put the import task in the queue, but this is not the case.  For all the CRON jobs they recommend at this link, Mautic does not mention anything about scheduling imports.  You can simply go to your command line and type this to execute:

$ php /home/path/to/your/mautic/app/console mautic:import

Also, I set up a CRON job for this command to run every thirty minutes so this won’t happen to others in the future.  I do think CRON jobs have a place, but manually setting them up seems a little archaic, I think like WordPress they should be more automated, if nothing else to reduce the number of people who lack more web technical skills and just want to use the marketing automation system from scratching their heads or complaining.

Mautic is a great marketing automation tool, it comes in two flavors, the free Community Edition and the Enterprise Edition. It is quickly evolving into a stable and robust marketing automation system.  My favorite part is that Mautic is developed on the PHP Symfony framework, as an experienced PHP developer with decades of experience with different systems here in Jacksonville, Florida, I can say the past 4 years I have been watching Mautic grow that it is a very exciting time for small businesses and marketing departments that may not currently have a lot of resources or high budgets for higher cost platforms like SalesForce.  I can also speak from direct experience that it blows InfusionSoft out of the water with a lot more customization and capabilities.