Webmecanik updates the Mautic Community Zapier plugin
On January 28, 2020, Webmecanik provided the Mautic community with a major update to the Zapier plugin. We explain why we took this step, as well as the impact on your usage.
What is Zapier?
Zapier is a fantastic tool that makes it very easy (without technical skills) to connect applications to each other.
The structure of these connections has made Zapier a success. Indeed, when a software publisher creates a connection plugin to Zapier for its application, it is instantly connectable to all the other applications available on the hub.
When you develop a Zapier plugin, you configure two types of events: actions and triggers.
Actions
These are the operations that can be triggered when the application receives a message. For example, for our marketing automation tool, the creation of a contact in Webmecanik Automation.
The direction of communication is therefore from the third-party tool to the marketing automation tool.
Triggers
These are the operations that can trigger an action externally. Here, there are more of them in our marketing automation tool: when a contact is created, when a form is submitted, when a landing page is visited, when an existing contact is updated, when an email is opened, or if a contact’s score has changed.
The direction of communication is therefore from the marketing automation tool to the third-party tool.
What is changing?
Until now, the Mautic Community Zapier plugin used Basic Auth authentication. This fairly old authentication method has some drawbacks from a security standpoint.
As a result, and as a leading contributor to the community, we wanted to take charge of changing this authentication method to a more robust and secure one for our customers, but also for the community as a whole.
So it was at the end of January 2020 that we provided this improvement to the community.
What does this change for users of the old version?
Nothing! Well, a little bit anyway, but not immediately. There are 3 cases:
- You already had a connection with the old version: it will continue to work as before (we are not breaking backward compatibility). However, we invite you to update the connection when you have a little time. When the update is published, you should be notified.
- You were about to set up a connection: you will therefore use the new model; all you need to do is create an API key and authenticate as the plugin will ask you to do.
- You are a user of the version of Mautic offered by Webmecanik: you will receive, in the next few hours, a private invitation to use this new plugin right away.
When can you access this new version?
Webmecanik submitted it to the Mautic community as soon as it was finished at the end of January. The proposed code change must now go through community processes before an update is published. This may take several weeks.
Meanwhile, our Webmecanik Automation users will be able to use a private version of our plugin to benefit from it right away.
