Wagtail 5.0 Update - SVG Images, Dark Mode & Accessibility For SEO | Wagtail CMS

Hey everybody, Wagtail 5. 0 is out now, and I wanted to show you a few features I'm super excited about in this release. First of all, now you can change the admin theme from light to dark. So we go ahead and click that there. And now we can run Wagtail in Dark Mode. And I think it looks really, really great. If you have eye strain or you have accessibility needs, you're really going to enjoy dark mode. You'll also get a little bit more energy efficiency out of your screen from using dark mode. And we really do love making changes that help the planet like that. Now, if dark mode isn't a reason enough for you to upgrade, let me show you some things related to images we did in this release. First of all, when you add a new image, you'll see that there's a new format listed under supported formats.

Wagtail 5. 0 supports SVGs. Yes, you've been asking for SVGs, and now we're going to give them to you. So enjoy. I think your designers are going to be super happy to have another option to make all your projects look really great. Now while we're here in the image library, I want to show you one more thing. Say you wanted to delete images, like pare some things down. So I, you know, I'm gonna go ahead and delete this image of the Kiabata bread because I just want to go ahead and Reduce the number of images I have in my library. So I get this confirmation message, and now there's this line here that's telling me that this image appears seven times in my website. And I can click on it and I can see all the different places that this image appears across the website.

And this is a great new feature in Wagtail 5. 0. It gives you some more information. uh about your images and you know gives you an option to think more thoughtfully about do I really want to delete this image? Maybe I should update it. It's just one more great tool to help you manage it all your images in Wagtail. Now, one more thing I want to show you here. I'm going to go here to this blog post that has some accessibility issues in it If we look at the blog post on live view, you'll see that it looks pretty much like a standard blog post. Looks pretty great. Has some headings, some great pictures of bread. Uh and you know it just seems like a really really solid blog post.

However, if we go down here to the Wagtail bird here, which we normally use to access the admin or edit pages There's a line here called accessibility. And if we click it, we can see that there are three issues with this blog post that would make it really hard for somebody who uses a screen reader to read this blog post. And we don't want to have that. Like we want everybody to be able to enjoy this blog post. So let's have a look at these issues here. And we're gonna go ahead and X out of that and see if we can fix a few of them here. So let's go in H2, that looks pretty good. Oh, this should probably be a heading, so let's go ahead and Fix that here, we'll make that an H3

and then we'll check that this is an H4. So that heading hierarchy looks good from H2 to H3 to H4. Looks like we have an empty heading here, so let's delete that, tighten things up. We'll go ahead and publish that And then let's have another check here. And ah, look at that, a green zero. The accessibility checker has found no more issues with our blog posts. Or at least none of the issues it's checking for right now. So the current checker has a checks for some pretty common yet simple issues with accessibility. Wagtail 5. 0 gives you some more options to add some customized rules using an API. So definitely

if you're looking for options to make your web page more accessible. Definitely check out this tool. It is a great one. Highly recommend it. So those are my main reasons for upgrading to Wagtail 5. 0. If you need some more reasons or you need some more details, definitely check out our release notes. I'll put a link to those down in the video description. And also head on over to Wagtail. org slash get started, where we have all sorts of options for giving Wagtail a go. And I hope you enjoy this release. Give it a try. I think it's fantastic.