Wagtail has a new product strategy

Hey internet, I have some news to share with you, and that is that Wagtail CMS has a product strategy now. Ooh, shiny. So what's in this product strategy? Well, first there's a good little history lesson if you don't know where Wagtail came from or how it came to be. And we also share some of the past successes that we've had with Wagtail and how we think that that'll contribute to our future successes. If you want to skip that section over though, we have a kind of three big reasons that we think that Wagtail will be a compelling choice for users in the future. The first is it kind of provides a future-ready content management experience. It means that if users choose Wagtail and like the technology landscape shifts again tomorrow, chances are that Wagtail is

still a good investment even if there's been a big change. And so that's because we provide kind of a high quality structured content experience. We make it pretty easy for developers to move data around and to reorganize things and customize things uh you know according to any changes that happen in their publishing needs or their organization's needs. And so we think that that will continue to make Wagtail a compelling choice for people. And so we're gonna double down on a lot of that. and also provide some higher quality user experiences among the different workflows that we offer. So the second reason we think Wagtail will be a compelling choice besides its future readiness

is we think that it will provide deep integrations and customizations to make interoperability an even stronger choice for organizations. So one of the biggest challenges right now out there is that there's a lot of software and it doesn't all talk together particularly easy. And so Wagtail being based on Python, which is a language that is very popular and is used to manage a lot of different data services and things like that. uh is a way to kind of bring a lot of this stuff together and unify it. And so we think that that deep interoperability will make Wagtail a Great product choice for people who are looking to bring a lot of different moving pieces together.

And so uh, you know, this is one of the reasons why we're adding a write API to the next version of Wagtail and so that's uh that's kind of a key part of our strategy there. And finally the third thing that we think Wagtail will make Wagtail a compelling choice for people in the future is providing kind of a first class experience. experience for the people who are building with Wagtail. We want to make it easier to build with Wagtail, no matter whether you're a developer who handcrafts all the code yourself or whether you're a developer who has a whole Team of AI agents doing all your work for you. We want to make sure that we provide a first class experience for both groups and you know While we're talking about AI, let's, you know, address that

because it's definitely been one of the biggest shifts that we've seen in our industry in a very long time. And our product strategy had to reflect that. And so we developed these kind of five core guiding principles around AI. Uh if you've read any of our blog posts about the Wagtail AI package or seen any of the videos I've done on that, you might be familiar with these principles, but I just want to go over them. real quick because I think they're really well done. And I think anybody who's working with AI today should really consider adopting something similar And so kind of the first principle that we have around AI is that we are never going to provide an AI dependency in Wagtail Core. We are never gonna require people to use an AI model or to use an AI service.

It's always going to be optional And we think that that is a key part of making our software resilient and a good choice for people in the long term. The second principle is uh responsible approaches to AI. And so we want to try to encourage AI use practices that align with environmental sustainability, privacy preservation, and transparency as much as we possibly can. Like obviously we don't have control over the whole AI ecosystem. There are plenty of irresponsible people out there But we're going to do our best to try and be responsible and encourage others to be responsible as well. And so our third principle, which I think is part of being responsible, is

being model and provider agnostic. We are not going to force anybody to use a particular service or to depend on a particular company. We think that the future of this technology will likely be more open and we want to provide users with as much flexibility as possible. Our fourth principle is only the right AI. Rather than presuming that we should put AI in every single part of our workflows in our content management system. We want to empower our users to make decisions for themselves about how much or how little AI they want to use. And also we really want to encourage like application of AI that delivers actual time savings and actual values.

So we're looking at like use cases that you know AI is really well suitable for, like you know, very uh repeatable tasks like writing metadata and things like that. that. And finally, and this is the most important one that I think a lot of our product strategy and our AI strategy is built on top of, is human in the loop. We want to make sure that users always have autonomy and agency and be able to supervise any sort of AI model use within Wagtail. Uh, because, you know, it's important to keep humans in the loop. As we've seen multiple times uh with multiple different groups, like when you don't keep an eye eye on the AI, the hallucinations tend to get a little out of control and bad things happen.

We're all practical people on this channel here, so you're probably wondering how does all that lofty kind of business speak translate into the day-to-day? Well, fortunately we have a webpage for that, and that is our roadmap webpage, where we have mapped out the specific improvements that we're planning for the next couple releases and we also have a section uh called future where we kind of bucket together all the things that we're hoping to work on in the future. And if you're curious about the details of those particular things, if you click on each one, it takes you to a GitHub discussion or a GitHub issue that goes over the details of each of those And if you're really excited about something that has a little sponsorship flag and you happen to know somebody who has some budget to help make this particular feature happen even faster, then please get in touch with us.

We totally want to hear from you. I just want to end this by saying that even though this strategy was written by a few people on our product team, It reflects the wider generosity of this community. We are so grateful to everybody who has given us time, who has given us code, who has given us money. And that generosity is a key part of what will make this strategy happen. And the more that we work on building Wagtail together, the better it will be. So we're looking to build a future where software serves people, where software solves problems, and where software provides users with even more agency and even more choice.

If that is the type of future that you want to be a part of, then please join us. Like this video. Subscribe to our YouTube channel. Get our newsletter. Come to our uh conference, Wagtail Space. It's coming up in November. Please join us. We would love to have you.