Mautic Content Block Plugin

Overview

The Friendly Content Block Plugin is a Mautic plugin developed by Friendly in 2026 to make reusable email content significantly easier to manage.

The idea is simple: content that is used repeatedly should not have to be manually recreated in every email. The plugin allows marketers to save frequently used sections as reusable Content Blocks and insert them into other emails directly from the Mautic builder.

This is particularly useful for organizations that repeatedly use standardized headers, footers, legal information, calls to action, product sections, language-specific elements and other recurring components.

The project combines two objectives important to Friendly: making Mautic more powerful for professional marketing teams and contributing useful functionality back to the open-source ecosystem on which our own products are built.

Background and context

As organizations expand their marketing activities in Mautic, maintaining a consistent design across a growing number of emails becomes increasingly difficult.

Many parts of marketing communications are repeated again and again: headers, footers, legal notices, call-to-action sections, product blocks, contact information and language-specific variants.

With the standard Mautic builder, these elements often have to be recreated or copied manually between emails. Over time, this can lead to small design differences, outdated content or multiple slightly different versions of what should be the same approved component.

Friendly encountered this problem repeatedly in professional Mautic environments. Marketing teams wanted the flexibility to create individual emails while maintaining a library of approved, reusable design elements.

The challenge becomes even more apparent in multilingual environments. The same header, footer or content structure may exist in several languages, with only the text changing.

This led Friendly to develop the Friendly Content Block Plugin in 2026.

Editors can select a section they have already designed in Mautic, save it as a Content Block and make it available for future emails. The plugin therefore acts as a lightweight design library inside Mautic, allowing teams to maintain frequently used and approved components instead of repeatedly recreating them.

The result is faster email creation, greater consistency and a more scalable content-production workflow.

Implementation

The Friendly Content Block Plugin provides a reusable content library integrated directly into the Mautic GrapesJS/MJML email builder.

Content Blocks are stored as their own Mautic entities in a dedicated database table. Each contains a name, its saved content and optional metadata such as an icon or category. Blocks can also be managed independently through a dedicated interface in Mautic.

Creating and using Content Blocks

When an editor selects a supported section in GrapesJS, the plugin adds a “Save as Block” action. The selected section is converted into its underlying markup and stored as a reusable block.

Editors can give the block a name and select a visual icon or language flag to make it easier to identify.

The plugin also provides an Import MJML Block function, allowing editors to paste MJML directly and save it to the library.

Saved blocks appear in the standard GrapesJS block panel and can be dragged and dropped into an email just like native builder components. They can also be edited or deleted from within the builder or through the plugin's Content Blocks management area.

The current implementation is designed for emails using Mautic's GrapesJS/MJML builder. Landing pages are not currently supported.

Reusable rather than synchronized

Content Blocks work as reusable templates rather than live synchronized components.

When a block is inserted into an email, its markup is copied into that email. The editor can then modify the inserted copy independently.

Updating the original Content Block changes what will be inserted in the future, but does not automatically modify emails where an earlier version has already been used.

This provides an important balance: teams can start from approved components while individual emails remain independent and editable. Existing emails also remain intact if the original Content Block is subsequently changed or deleted.

Permissions and governance

The plugin integrates with Mautic's native permission system. Administrators can control who can view, create, edit and delete Content Blocks, including Mautic's distinction between a user's own items and those created by others.

This is useful for larger teams where a smaller group may maintain approved designs while a wider group of marketers can use them.

The current implementation does not include dedicated Content Block version history, rollback or automatic synchronization.

Supported versions

Dedicated versions of the plugin support Mautic 5 and Mautic 7.

The current Mautic 7 development version requires PHP 8.2–8.5 and Mautic Core 7.x.

What distinguishes the implementation?

One of the key strengths is that Content Blocks work inside Mautic's existing email editing workflow rather than introducing a separate editor.

Blocks are registered directly with GrapesJS and behave like native builder components. An editor can design a section, save it and reuse it without leaving the builder.

The workflow is straightforward:

Design once → Save as Content Block → Add to the shared library → Reuse across emails → Customize where needed

The combination of direct GrapesJS integration, MJML import, reusable visual components, native Mautic permissions and a dedicated management interface effectively provides Mautic with a lightweight design-system library for email content.

Rather than maintaining duplicate templates, teams can standardize the individual building blocks from which their emails are assembled.

Adoption and results

After rolling out the feature to 80 clients, we saw strong adoption: more than half began actively using Content Blocks, and together they have already created over 300 reusable blocks across all installations.

This early adoption supports the original assumption behind the project: reusable email components address a practical problem for organizations managing larger numbers of communications.

The benefit becomes particularly visible in multilingual and multi-brand environments, where the same structures are repeatedly needed across campaigns. Instead of searching for an old email and manually copying a section, editors can select an approved component directly from the builder.

Lessons learned

Developing the Content Block Plugin reinforced an important principle for us: more flexibility does not necessarily result in a better user experience.

Our first versions allowed users to save not only complete sections, but also individual text blocks and columns. Technically this provided more freedom, but in practice it proved counterproductive. Inserting these smaller components into existing emails could interfere with the surrounding structure and break layouts.

Instead of making email creation easier, the additional flexibility sometimes created more work.

We therefore deliberately narrowed the functionality and focused on complete sections as the reusable unit. This made Content Blocks more predictable and significantly reduced the risk of damaging existing layouts.

A second challenge was surprisingly visual: how should users identify their saved blocks?

Our first approach relied on text labels, but there is limited space in the GrapesJS block panel. We then introduced icons representing the position or purpose of a block. User testing revealed another issue: in multilingual environments, knowing the content type was not enough. Users also needed to quickly identify the language.

We eventually settled on a combination of visual icons and language flags. Icons communicate the structure or purpose of a block, while flags make language-specific variants immediately recognizable.

These iterations reinforced a broader lesson: scalability in Mautic is not only about infrastructure, database performance or sending volume. It is also about making everyday workflows manageable as the number of emails, languages, designs and users grows.

The plugin therefore evolved not by adding as many options as possible, but by observing how marketers actually use it, removing functionality that created unnecessary complexity and improving the workflows that proved genuinely useful.

Future plans

The Friendly Content Block Plugin is still at the beginning of its development journey, and we see several opportunities to expand it.

A key planned extension is API access, allowing Content Blocks to be managed programmatically and used as part of integrations and automated content workflows.

We would also like to extend Content Blocks to the Mautic landing page builder. Landing pages have many of the same requirements as emails, including recurring headers, footers, forms, calls to action and standardized design elements.

Another planned direction is portability between Mautic installations. We want to make it easier to export or transfer Content Blocks from one Mautic instance to another. This could be particularly useful for agencies, organizations operating multiple installations and teams maintaining common design libraries across different environments.

As Content Block libraries grow, we also want to improve how blocks are displayed, organized and discovered. Our experience with icons, flags and user testing has already demonstrated how important quick visual identification becomes as the number of blocks increases.

Future development will continue to be guided by practical usage, customer requirements and feedback from the Mautic community.

Community contributions

The Friendly Content Block Plugin is being made available free of charge as an open-source project on GitHub for the Mautic community.

For us, this is an intentional contribution rather than simply a distribution channel.

Friendly commercially builds services and products on top of Mautic. We therefore believe that we also have a responsibility to contribute useful functionality back to the ecosystem.

By publishing the source code, other organizations and developers can use the plugin, inspect it, adapt it and contribute improvements.

Community collaboration has already played an important role in its development. We are particularly grateful to Leuchtfeuer for helping us test the project and for providing valuable feedback and advice on its architecture and coding standards. Their input helped improve the technical quality of the plugin and align its implementation more closely with established practices in the Mautic ecosystem.

This is exactly what we value about open-source development: different organizations can combine their experience and expertise to create better solutions for the whole community.

We hope the project will follow the path of our earlier Mautic plugins: starting with a problem encountered in our own work, becoming openly available and ultimately evolving through adoption, feedback and contributions from the wider community.

Supporting materials

Product/documentation page:
Friendly Content Blocks documentation

GitHub:
Friendly Content Block Plugin public repository

Inclusion as a Case Study

Yes. Friendly is happy for this project to be included as a case study on the mautic.org website and in the Mautic Pitch Deck.

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