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 our Knowledgebase, developers blog, and developer documentation.

As a project, we also apply to the Season of Docs each year - keep an eye on social media for future opportunities.

Getting started

The first thing to do is to join #t-marketing on Slack and introduce yourself!

Writing for the blog / website

The Marketing Team maintains a Jira board specifically for content and editorial work. Our boards are publicly accessible, but you will need an account to be assigned issues or add responses. Please drop a message in the Marketing Team channel if you need an invitation to Jira.

Once you have found an article you'd like to work on, please check the writer's brief which will be attached as a Google Doc, located in our shared 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, and when you're ready to have it reviewed just drop a message in Jira and let people 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 eg. 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."

Copyright

The Mautic Project reserves the right to remove any content at any time without notice.

The Community Blog content falls under the direct oversight of the Marketing Team. Open Source Collective hold the Mautic trademarks on our behalf.

As a matter of general practice, Mautic's Legal and Finance Team does not get involved in content except worrying about things like the FTC issue, libel and copyright.

Community blog authors keep their copyright but the Mautic Project also has the right to reuse the work. If someone does not want to give the Mautic Project that right, it should be discussed with the Project Lead.

Article Submission Guide
Our 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 400-650 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 we look 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, e.g. users, commenters, forum members, developers, documenters, 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 (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, i.e. 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 our 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 – what we require

For all articles we require you to submit your pitch via the Editorial Calendar Jira Board.

Your pitch will be moved into either the ‘forming’ stage (where we will ask you to provide more information, research or background detail to help us determine whether it is appropriate for the Community Blog) or directly to the ‘writing’ stage.

When your pitch is moved into the writing stage, you take up the responsibility for writing the content within the time frame on the card. Please note the draft due date – this is when you need to have finished writing the article.

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, e.g. January 1, 2011.
  • Write "20 to 30", not "20-30".
  • For most subjects, we are looking for articles consisting of approximately 400-650 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). You can follow (them) on (social networks/GitHub repo) and read more of (their) (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 Slack.

References

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

References

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

Technical writers

If you're a technical writer, or interested in writing content for a technically-minded audience, we have lots of tasks in the Education Team's Jira board. There are opportunities to write for the Knowledgebase - which may include tutorials, best practice and examples of how to do specific things in Mautic.

You can also improve and update the content we have on our User Guide. We suggest beginning with any section of the documentation that is unclear, out of date, or may benefit from more description 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 blog in the developers section, 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 our shared Google Drive folder. 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 make sure you provide regular updates on the issue in Jira, and if at any point you're not going to be able to complete the task, please call that out in a comment on the issue (or send your Team Lead a message to inform them) so that somebody else can pick it up.

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.

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