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.