Video Tour of Wagtail 7.4

Hello internet! I've got some great news to share with you. Wagtail 7. 4 is here, and there's a lot of good things to be excited about in this release. It's a long-term support release, so we've got a good mix of maintenance, goodness, and new features. And y'all, we came so close, so close uh to this release coming up on May the 4th, which for those of you who don't know is Star Wars Day. May the 4th be with you. Yeah. Um, so I was a smidge disappointed that I couldn't make a ton of Star Wars jokes in this video. Uh, but as Yoda would say, disappointed we are move forward, we must. So let's go ahead and see some of the great new things that you can find in Wagtail

7. 4, and I'll go over some good reasons for you to upgrade. Welcome to a version of the Wagtail Bakery demo that I modified with some code. The first feature I'm going to show off is the customized Page Explorer, and Sage Abdullah who created the feature gave me some code to show off with. So thank you, Sage. So we have here the homepage for the Wagtail Bakery, and we have all the typical columns that you would have that would come by default in the Wagtail page. Explorer, like the title of the page, when the page was last updated, the type of page here, and also the status of the page, whether it's published or whether it's a draft. And then you'll notice right here that there's a new column. called Slug. And this is not a new standard column that's going to appear everywhere.

No, this is a custom column. This is a column that has been added to show you that you can add your own columns now. If there's something you want to sort your pages by, whether it's a slug or whether it's by a date or another field, you you can do it now with the customizable page explorer. And like, so all of the pages now and the page explorer have slug included as a part of this code here. Uh but one it might not be the most useful field to add, particularly for editors. I don't know. Um it doesn't do a whole lot for me. It might do something for you. Uh but the one that I'm excited about if we go into our blog page is here here, the additional columns we have in addition to slug

here. Now we have the publication date, which is very important because like the publication date is not the same as the update date. So you definitely they're like, oh, when did we publish that article? It was about two years ago, but somebody might have made an edit since then, and then you can't find it because the dates don't line up. So having this column here and being able to sort according to the actual publication date that's included in the article is very useful and another great way to help people find things. And then Sage also included um, you know, a opportunity to sort things according to thumbnail. I honestly like it does move, see it does change. Uh but I honestly don't know what it's sorting by.

I I don't know w like what's considered a higher ranked bread picture versus a lower ranked bread picture. I have no idea. Maybe it's ranked by file size. But this is a handy way to pull out the thumbnail as well so that your editors can see as a at a glance like what image it is and for very visual editors and content creators that can be a very helpful way to find some of the content they're looking for when they're going through their Wagtail pages. Let's head over to one of the blog posts so that I can show you a few more of the features that we have in Wagtail 7. 4. Let's go with dessert with benefits. That one sounds like fun.

And so right now, uh when you open this up and you can see the preview panel is already open, you'll notice right away that there is something different. About the preview panel. Now we have these red caution signs that are appearing in the preview panel. And the reason they're there is because the checks which normally you only find in the checks panel here, are now in the preview panel as well, to prompt editors to fix issues with their pages. And honestly, like, you know, flipping back and forth between these panels uh is a little bit of a pain in the butt. So this makes it so much easier to notice that something is going wrong with the page. And so let's go ahead and have a look at these. You'll notice like here

this one says incorrect heading hierarchy, avoiding skipping levels. You'll notice here like that this is smaller than this one here. So I probably have an H3. instead of an h2. If we go down here and highlight, yep, yeah, that's an H3 instead of an H2. So if I fix This here, that clear up, that check. Yeah, there it goes. Went away. That was um very easy to fix. And the other one right here is a new one to Wagtail 7. 4 It is saying the meta description is empty, and that is very bad if you want to have good SEO for your page. And it's very easy to miss the meta descriptions in Wagtail because they almost always live over here in the pre

promote tab and so let's just go ahead and add something we're not gonna do a whole SEO optimize thing right now now because I don't want to type a whole lot but McBoston Cream is amazing. Uh we'll just type something like that. And you know, it's not going to flag whether or not your meta description is any good. It's just checking to make sure it's there. But this is a really great thing to have. So you'll see now like all the red signs are cleared out And if we go to the checks panel here, you can see no issues are found as well, which means that we pretty much fixed almost everything on this panel.

page. And I find that particularly helpful because the promote tab makes it very easy to forget about some of your metadata. And so I I'm glad that we add this check. Honestly, it's going to be a little bit helpful to me too when I'm putting together my content One other quick thing that I want to point out that is pretty easy to show is so we now made deferred validation something that is a part of StreamField in addition to the rest of the fields on the the page. So it used to be like if I added a block here and I didn't have an image here, that autosave up here would pause. and wait until you filled in

the stream field that has a required field. That doesn't happen anymore. This it stream field blocks will no longer get in the way of auto Uh they will however like you know the requirement like if I try to publish this it'll still uh you know give me a big red error and be like uh hello you didn't put an image here. You should totally go do that. You silly person. Uh so that's uh still a feature there. Deferred validation doesn't mean that you can publish without the required fields, but it does mean that autosave will work now and you don't have to worry uh about losing little bits and pieces in your stream field blocks. So great addition.

I'm happy that this is happening. So I've honestly run out of super shiny features to show you within the Wagtail admin because this is a long-term support release, and we've done a lot of maintenance goodness to make this a good and stable release that will last for a long time. long time for you. And you know, we also smoothed out some things around autosave and a lot of very small UX changes that should make the experience a bit more polished for your editors. But another big thing that we focused on in this release was expanding some of our documentation. And one of the big things you'll notice in our docs now is we now have a new advanced guide for content personalization. And this is something that marketing people absolutely love. love because they can take one page and use it for like five different audiences.

And a lot of people assume that you can't do this in Wagtail, but you actually can. There are quite a few things in Wagtail that support these features It's just that nobody knows about them or knows how to use them. So we decided to put together an official guide for these different features that you can use for content. personalization things like you know time aware variants uh doing segmented content uh members only content and things like that So this it's it's a short but very powerful guide. If you're a developer and you want to offer these features to your content people or to your clients, you definitely should go check this out. out. And the other big thing we added to our documentation is in the packages section.

So we love our package manual. maintainers. And we know that one of the things that makes Wagtail a very healthy and mature open source project is all the packages that are available for for Wagtail, but but it can be a little hard to know how to get started. So we provided some official guidance under this creating packages section. that provides you with some very useful information about like the official package template, how to get listed in the various places like PyPI, like recommendations for naming things to make it easier. for people to pine your packages. If you are already a package maintainer or if you're thinking of making a Wagtail package, then you totally want to start here with this

guide. The last thing I'll say is that Wagtail 8. 0 is actually not that far out, y'all. So if you're looking for a release that has a lot of the shiny new features in it like autosave but doesn't come with a lot of breaking changes misery then Wagtail 7. 4 is the release for you And if you want more of the details, if you're curious what's under the hood, I have a link to the release notes down in the video description. Thank you so much for watching. y'all. If you want more videos like this, please like this video, please subscribe to our channel, and I hope to see you back here soon.