Have you considered releasing the app as open source?

Jose Vega

Jose Vega

Member
Hi, first of all I love mailwizz, I think it´s a great app with huge potential.

But there are a lot of features missing, like the drag and drop editor, intelligent segmentation (like sending a campaign to subscribers who opened the last 10 campaigns, rank users based on activity like mailchimp does), documentation for developers, more tutorials, etc.

I understand that maybe you are a solo developer or a small team, and you dont have the time and resources to improve the app faster.

So I wonder if you have considered releasing the app as open source like WordPress. I think it would be a good thing, you would get a lot of attention, a lot of developers would help to add features, and make this the best email marketing app.

You could make a lot of money by offering professional consultation, creating your own marketplace to sell themes and add-ons, sell images so people can start a server with everything set up, offer hosting solutions custom made for mailwizz, etc.
 
Hi,

For several personal reasons mailwizz will be a closed source project, but i can see why you need this open sourced, you'd get a faster development, but a faster development doesn't really mean a quality development so it might not be such a good thing after all, look at PHPList for example, it is open source but still, people buy commercial products :)
 
twisted1919 said:
Hi,

For several personal reasons mailwizz will be a closed source project, but i can see why you need this open sourced, you'd get a faster development, but a faster development doesn't really mean a quality development so it might not be such a good thing after all, look at PHPList for example, it is open source but still, people buy commercial products :)
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@twisted1919 I understand. This get me thinking about this:

1- Do you have a roadmap? a page where we can see the new features that are in development and release schedules.

2- Do you have other projects besides mailwizz? do you spend time working on other apps?

3- Are you a solo developer?

I´m just curious about your plans for this app.
 
@Jose Vega

For now i am the only developer and the "roadmap" is in my head for now.
This is going to, hopefully change, in the near future when i will hire a full-time developer for helping with all mailwizz related things.
I am working on setting up position requirements, salary, benefits and so on but because this will be a on site position, will take a while to find the right person that is also living in my town.
As far as other projects, i do have yes, but almost all are related to mailwizz, say services that should help mailwizz customers, like the email validation service, but all of them are work in progress with no ETA, again, hiring new people will help get things going faster.

If you are concerned about mailwizz development stopping or the like, you should have no worry, mailwizz will be developed for the years to come, trust me.

As a side note, development does not mean just adding new features, improving existing code is the most important aspect of development, and i am doing this constantly with mailwizz ;)

Hope it helps.
Thanks.
 
twisted1919 said:
@Jose Vega

For now i am the only developer and the "roadmap" is in my head for now.
This is going to, hopefully change, in the near future when i will hire a full-time developer for helping with all mailwizz related things.
I am working on setting up position requirements, salary, benefits and so on but because this will be a on site position, will take a while to find the right person that is also living in my town.
As far as other projects, i do have yes, but almost all are related to mailwizz, say services that should help mailwizz customers, like the email validation service, but all of them are work in progress with no ETA, again, hiring new people will help get things going faster.

If you are concerned about mailwizz development stopping or the like, you should have no worry, mailwizz will be developed for the years to come, trust me.

As a side note, development does not mean just adding new features, improving existing code is the most important aspect of development, and i am doing this constantly with mailwizz ;)

Hope it helps.
Thanks.
Click to expand...

@twisted1919 I understand.

1- Can you share the roadmap ? I just want to know what´s coming for mailwizz. I dont need to know dates, just the new features.

2- You could post a few tutorials or articles about mailwizz architecture. I know it´s hard to find good developers, and even more hard to find people in our local communities.

So, I think it would be better if you create those posts, which will help us as a starting guide.

For example, I am a programmer and I need some features for my own use, so I would love to contribute to mailwizz. Help you develop new features, but I need a small guidance.

I already used mailwizz REST API for some integrations, but some features need core modification.

The time you´ll spend doing this tutorials will be an investment for you. I am willing to help on the development for free during the weekends.

3- The things I want to improve in mailwizz:

a) When I add the Google Analytics campaign query strings to the links, the page is refreshed and we loose the unsaved changes. This should be added with javascript so the page is not refreshed.

b) Actions set when clicking links are not working

c) The current editor sometimes strips styles. For example, I have all the text with a font size of 16, then I paste a plain-text paragraph and suddenly all the links are black and the text gets smaller.

d) Add users ranking so we can see which users are the most active, and be able to segment our lists using those rankings.

This is very important from an economical perspective. I dont want to spend money emailing people that don´t open my emails. This could save us a lot of money.

e) Segment list based on users activity on multiple campaigns

f) When I copy a campaign that containers urls in the plain text email with Google Analytics campaign variables, the GA variables are broken. Mailwizz adds a semicolon to the variables names. For example, utm_term becomes utm;_term.

This is very annoying because I have to manually remove the semicolon.
 
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@Jose Vega - These are all valid points, thank you :)
For #2 - can you tell me what exactly you need to know?
For the "broken" things, be sure we will fix them.
 
I will also be interested in knowing about the roadmap/future, at least for the next two releases :). Because, I'm planning to extend the app to a greater extend. So, if the features I am going to implement are gonna be available on the next release, I'll be literally wasting my effort,time and money on it. Most importantly, a feature that is implemented by an external developer and @twisted1919 will have a huge difference, as you're thorough with the total ins and outs about the system. :)
 
VVT said:
I will also be interested in knowing about the roadmap/future, at least for the next two releases :). Because, I'm planning to extend the app to a greater extend. So, if the features I am going to implement are gonna be available on the next release, I'll be literally wasting my effort,time and money on it. Most importantly, a feature that is implemented by an external developer and @twisted1919 will have a huge difference, as you're thorough with the total ins and outs about the system. :)
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@VVT That´s a valid concern. But it shouldn´t be a problem for these reasons:

1- When I develop something for mailwizz, I´ll make the necessary tests to make sure the feature works as expected.

2- @twisted1919 and I would work as a team. Whenever I have a new feature ready, he will review my code and give suggestions and until he´s satisfied with my work he will merge my changes to mailwizz. So at the end, every new feature I would develop would be approved by him.

3- I suggest you that if you implement new features to your mailwizz, please share the code with @twisted1919 so he can merge the changes to the app and we all can benefit from them.

That´s basically what I´ll be doing. Let´s build a community :)
 
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Yeah, am open to do that, but the thing is that, I'm not a developer :) . I looked for some developers and it was very difficult to find someone with the right skill. As of now, I have developed an extension to mask certain price plans so that it will be private to a set of customers only. It's helpful if we are going to sell customized plans to certain customers, so that others wont see that and get offended ;).

And, @twisted1919 has my login. He can take the extension for MailWizz project if he's ok with the code. But even I felt that's not perfect. May be he can make it perfect, if so, would be helpful to all.
 
Great exchange in this thread. Gives me even more confidence in Mailwizz because (a) the original developer (twisted1919) has an eye on continual development while keeping an eye on quality control and (b) there is a lot of external talent from current users to aid in future development by providing good ideas and to some extent adding to the code. Nice.
 
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