Cal Evans has posted the second part of his series as he works through the installation and configuration of the Mautic PHP-based marketing automation tool. In this part of the series he focuses on cron jobs.

This time we are talking about the cron jobs necessary to make Mautic run. Mautic has several commands that are necessary to execute that are not web based. They are run from the command line manually (dumb idea) or using a scheduler like cron on Linux. As with my “Installing Mautic” post, this post is only interesting to those of you self-hosting Mautic.

There is a great manual page on this titles “Cron Jobs”. It tells you a lot of what I’ll tell you here. If you haven’t read it yet, I highly recommend you start there.

He talks about each of the four jobs that, if you're using the system yourself, will want to run often: one for handling segments, two for campaigns and another for sending messages. He also talks about the main problem he ran into during his work with the cron jobs - permissions issues. He shares how he resolved this issue with an extra line in his crontab (after changing the user they ran as) and ends with some extra advice against wide open permissions.

Cal Evans has continued his series covering Mautic, the PHP based self-hosted marketing automation platform. This is step one in the process with his previous post in the series introducing Mautic and why he's trying it out.

This is the second post in a series titled “My Journey into Mautic”. If you are starting here, you might get an incomplete picture, you may want to check out the previous articles.

There are two things that really confuse me about Mautic, properly configuring an Email Service Provider (ESP), and segmenting & tagging. We’ll tackle the latter one in a later post, but the former is an important topic. It is also one that I do not fully understand. What is presented here is what I have learned through trial and error. it my be partially or wholly incorrect. If you find something that I’ve gotten wrong, please, by all means, correct me in the comments.

He starts by defining what an ESP service is and what it's useful for. While he had done the self-hosted email server in the past, he recommends paying for a service these days, deciding for his needs on Mailgun. He covers the difference between transactional and broadcast emails followed by the setup process he followed to get Mailgun up and working with his Mautic install.

Cal Evans, in a search to help make the marketing efforts for some of his products easier, has kicked off a series showing how to install and configure the PHP-based Mautic marketing automation platform.

Those that know me know that I have an obsession with marketing. I mean I’m no good at it, but the topic fascinates me. Almost all of the podcasts I listen to on a regular basis are marketing related. One topic in particular that interests me is “Marketing Automation”. Marketing Automation covers a huge swath of topics and since I am not an expert at the, I won’t attempt to explain them.

[...] Because I am interested in Marketing Automation and want to start applying the techniques in the projects I run. I started looking around for vendors who could provide these services. What I found is that most SaaS vendors assume that everybody who wants to use their software has deep pockets.

Without these "deep pockets" (pricey services) at his disposal, Cal looked for other options and found the self-hosted Mautic instead. He starts with a definition of his requirements including that it should be Open Source, that it should integrate with WordPress and he can contribute back to the project. He ends the post by outlining his planned platform using Mautic, WordPress, Mailgun, Mailchimp and Ditigal Ocean.

The Laravel News site has posted an interview with Justin Jackson, one of the speakers at the upcoming Laracon US conference and creator of Marketing for Developers (among other things).

Laracon US is still a few months away and this year it has an awesome line up of speakers. One of the new faces is Justin Jackson, who is what you could call a habitual maker. He launches more products than I have ideas.

Justin is a former Product Manager and has now transitioned into a full-time product person. He builds products such as Marketing for Developers, runs the MegaMaker podcast, and sells a book named Jolt! What follows is a quick interview with Justin to share some insights into making products and what to expect during his Laracon talk.

In the interview Justin answers questions about his background, his talk at Laracon US and launching products.

In a new post to the SitePoint Business & Marketing blog Chris Ward asks an interesting question that applies to both the business side and development: do you need an API?.

API stands for ‘Application Programming Interface’ and as the name implies, creating one is a technical process. This article will talk very little about how to create an API as there are a myriad of methods to undertake that. This article aims to focus on the business side of APIs and supply advice for non-technical folk. [...] You may be a forward thinking individual inside of an organizational structure that doesn’t share your views. How can you convince others around you that having an API may be good for your business?

He talks about three of the main kinds of organizations out there that usually have APIs including government, civic and science organizations and most other online services that integrate them into their core services. He also tries to help you answer the question for your own organization by listing some of the positives it can provide as well as some of the negatives that could balance them out. He ends the post with one final recommendation if you do choose to implement an API: "Don't reinvent the wheel".

In a new post to her site Francesca Krihely starts looking at the developer experience - how developers relate to your service and product and what kinds of things you need to be doing to help engage them.

I had a great brainstorm a few weeks back with the members of the Developer Evangelists meetup on the topic of the User Journey, or as I’ll call it now, the Developer Experience. The main problem we wanted to solve was how we convert new users into experts or awesoms users. In many ways, a Community Manager and/or Developer Evangelist is responsible for driving user adoption and making users successful, so this is a topic near and dear to all of our hearts. I walked away with three key things that help improve the developer experience: Great Product, Great Support and Empowerment.

This post talks about the first point - the "great product" - and notes that, if the product isn't useful and enjoyable to use, even developers won't bother with it. She also talks some about the need for quality documentation and how it can be seen as a sort of "marketing" to developers.

Work on making your product fit for an awesome developer experience. If you build it, they will come.

New on the Blue Parabola blog today is Matthew Turland's latest article in his in-depth look at the features the Magento e-commerce application offers. This time he focuses on the promotions and tools that it includes for marketing the site you have installed.

The majority of the features listed in this area have already been covered in this series. As such, sections for those features in this post are simply linked to other posts where appropriate.

Topics mentioned include:

• Coupons
• Multi-Tier Pricing
• Customer Group-specific Pricing and Group-specific Tier Pricing
• Search Engine Friendly URLs
• New Items Promotional Tool

See the the full post for the complete list (some of which have been mentioned before).

If you're a PHP developer in either the US or Canada, Esther Shindler is in need of your opinions (as mentioned by this post by Cal Evans on the Zend Developer Zone).

A friend of mine, Esther Shindler, contacted me recently to help her reach the PHP community. Since I don't know all of you (I'm really trying though) I'm reaching out to any US or Canadian PHP developers who have 10 minutes to spare and know two or three other US or Canadian PHP developers that might be willing to help as well. Here's all I need you to do: Take the survey and pass the link along to your other US and Canadian PHP developers buddies.

The target audience they're looking for to take this quiz are people working on open source tools in the US/Canada that regularly use one of the following: Joomla, phpBB, SugarCRM, Drupal, WordPress. If that fits you, head over and share your opinions (they might also contact you by phone for a follow-up).

Tim Anderson has posted some of his thoughts on a subject has has been a bit sensitive in the past - Zend's status as it comes to the PHP language.

I had a brief chat with Rasmus Lerdorf who is speaking later. I asked him about Zend, which presents itself as the PHP company (that is actually the slogan on its web site). Is it really? Lerdorf says Zend has no special status. While acknowledging its contribution, he says there are 1300 PHP committers, and only 6 work for Zend. He emphasizes that PHP is a community project and that decisions are made by consensus, influenced by who is actually willing to write the code, not by Zend or any company.

They also spoke a bit about the PHP Development Tools for the Eclipse IDE and where the strong marketing push is in the PHP community.

Brandon Savage has a new look at an old problem in the PHP community - the importance of a developers' understanding of marketing in applications.

Technical people seem particularly bad at marketing effectively. I think this is because we’re fact-oriented, focused on the features and neat ideas our products include. We’ll spend pages and pages talking about the cool things that our tool or application can do. And then we’ll wonder why our client didn’t buy it. Why do we do this? Because we forget that marketing isn’t about features it’s about meeting needs.

He points to the hierarchy of needs as an example of what really has to be considered when developing software. The further down the pyramid you and your software can go, the more effective your marketing can be. An application can do everything under the sun, but if it doesn't do what the customer wants, it'll be tossed aside.