Latest updates in the 6.2 release, concurrent editing, newsletter package, Wagtail Starter and more

Speaker 1: So welcome everybody to the latest edition of What's New in Wagtail. For those of you that are new to our webinars, I'm Lisa and I'm head of marketing at Torchbox and I'm your host for today or your co-host because I'm also joined by Thibaut who is hosting with me today. Thibaut is a senior front-end developer and Wagtail lead And we are joined by Albina, Sage and Matthew who are sharing updates on the latest 6. 2 release. We also have Thibaut giving us a taste of what's in the next release, so 6. 3 We also have Jake who's doing a live demo of Wagtail Starter Kit and Megan's going to give a community update and we are delighted to also be joined by Cameron today from Freedom of the Press

Speaker 1: And he is joining Alex to tell us all about the new newsletter package. So that's brilliant. So welcome Cameron. We have got time for questions during the session. So After each section, we'll have time to answer your questions live. If you can use the Q<unk>A, which you should be able to find from the Zoom navigation, it helps us to keep track of which ones we've answered. and which ones we haven't. I am recording the webinar so that I can share it with you after. So I'll send a follow-up email which will have links to any of the resources that we reference and the demos and things like that as well. So you'll get that Live transcript is available if you should need it. Um, and I think that's about it. So I am going to hand over to Tebow.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Lisa. Hi everyone, I'm Thibaut. Pronunciance. We have quite a bit to cover today. I just wanted to give you a heads up that we'll start with the Wacte 602 updates and most of the things you hear there. have already been available for quite a few months, but you might not have heard about them anyway just yet. And again, just want to emphasize uh the more interactive it is, the better for us. So any questions in the Q<unk>A zoom uh feature or in the chat, very welcoming. And that out of the way, I'll hand over to Albina, who's going to get us started with updates on alt -text validation and the checker panel in Wagteil 602.

Speaker 3: Thank you, Tipo. My name is Albina and I'm developer at Torchbox and contributor at Vagtail. Let me share my screen and let me start with a little bit of drama. So today we know that the content is king and uh ensuring that every word counts and is accessible to everyone is uh essential and I'm excited to talk about the latest Vactail features that enhance editor experience and help create better content. So the first one is the content metrics. Why it is important. Well, there are multiple studies that suggest that the content lengths affect uh both reader uh engagement, search engine visibility, and overall effectiveness of the post.

Speaker 3: And that is why we've added content metrics like word count and reading time. They are located directly within the page editor Here in the check panels, check panels, and they update it live. So for example, if we add a little bit more text here, we will immediately see the update. These calculations are based on the contents of the preview panel, and they are language-specific, which is really important. We use both language Avara text segmentation and language-specific reading speeds. And we've started with these 12 languages with English as a fallback. And fun fact, the

Speaker 3: difference between like reading times in different languages varies significantly. For example Arabic versus Italian is 60% difference with Arabic at 180 words per minute and Italian 285 words per minute. The next feature is about making sure that the content you're creating and specifically the images are more accessible. Again, why it is important? Well, because uh the uh number of images on websites is just skyrocketing with whooping 56 uh images per homepage on average and almost 30% increase just over the last year, it is still second most common accessibility issue, the missing alt text or the poor quality alt

Speaker 3: text And that is why again we now enforce the alt -text quality rule that checks if any images on the page contain uh anti-patterns, anti -text anti-patterns. Here for example we could see that two images are flagged as the ones that contain these bad patterns. And as for anti-patterns, we've started with image file extensions like . jp or. png and underscore assign that is really commonly used in image or photophile names. Why these antipatterns? Because first of all, they almost guarantee to give you zero false positives. And second, they are very common. According to our analysis, they are present in 25% of images.

Speaker 3: currently on Vactail websites. So this is a great start already. And for those of you who want to go even further, we've updated our API. So now you can edit or like customize existing bactail accessibility checks or add your own. And here is an example of how you could customize the AX checks that Flex um potential headings like paragraphs that act as potential headings based on your heading styles. And as for the future, based on the work we've done, we can now produce more advanced content metrics and content features like link whisperer or grammar checks

Speaker 3: or site-specific style guides after fixing off existing accessibility checks keyword, key phrases, checks, and even some AI tools, AI editor tools for the future. Please let us know. We would be happy to hear your feedback on pitch features, which content features you're most excited about. So again, we have the link whisper is the tool to suggest irrelevant links. Grammar checks, boring, yes, uh important, also yes. Uh site-specific style guide, uh, for example, could be used to avoid uh jargon. After fixing for existing accessibility checks to make it like super easy for editors, or

Speaker 3: keywords, key phrases, checks that are important for your for SEO for your website. and future AI-driven tools. So all these things can help enhance McDail editor experience even more. And we would be happy to hear your feedback. What do you think? What m excites you most?

Speaker 2: See the results coming in and there are definitely a few patterns already. It looks like everyone wants a bit of everything, to be completely honest. And um we do have a winner that Lisa will reveal shortly. which is the um auto fixing for existing accessibility checks. That's really cool to see because that's definitely something where We want Wagtail to help people build as accessible sites as possible and this is bang on target that feature. And uh we researched this quite a bit. It feels very doable

Speaker 3: Thank you a lot. And I will pass over to Sage to talk about concurrent editing.

Speaker 4: Thanks, Alpina. Let me share my screen. Okay, hopefully you can see that. Hey everyone, I'm about to show you one of the most exciting features we added in Lightel 6. 2. As we wrote in our blog post, having too many cooks in one kitchen may lead to someone getting burned. And the same is true of too many people trying to work simultaneously on the same piece of content. And even with good version control, which Vital definitely has, you could still unknowingly cause confusion by overwriting each other's changes. And this is a classic problem for many systems without real-time collaborative editing.

Speaker 4: Now, don't get your hopes too high, because we're not at that point yet, but we're getting closer. In Wikile 6. 2, we added a notification system that will give you an alert when someone has saved a new version of the same piece of content that you're editing. So let's see it in action. This is going to be a live demo, so let's hope that this goes well. I'm going to work on the same blog post tracking wild yeast at the same time as Lisa I just opened the editor and there's nothing that's out of the ordinary for now. So now Lisa, could you try opening the same blog post?

Speaker 4: And now I'll wait for a few seconds. Oh sorry, this is the stuff that we edited last time. So I'm going to uh add more stuff later, but uh as you can see just now um We can see Lisa's face at the top right and it says that she's currently viewing. So um yeah, if I I'm currently here on this page. Lisa can also see my face at the top right, but obviously I'm the one who's sharing my screen, so you cannot see my face at the top right. But uh now Lisa, could you try making some edits to the page, but don't save just yet.

Speaker 4: And let's wait a few seconds. Hopefully. All right. Now we can see that Lisa has unsaved changes, which means she has made some edits but she hasn't saved yet. So if I do the same like more edits. By me here. Lisa is going to see the same thing on her screen. And now Lisa, could you try saving the page? And now we wait for a few more seconds. Alright, now it says that Lisa saved a new version and it gives me the option to refresh And if I try to refresh,

Speaker 4: this will allow me to see the changes that Lisa made, but of course I will lose the changes that I haven't saved. So now what happens if I cancel and I try to save instead? I get a pop-up. It reminds me that Lisa has saved a new version. And I can proceed with saving my new changes, but it will override Lisa 's changes just now. Or I can refresh the page. And before this feature was added, if I clicked save, it would just immediately save a new revision overwriting Lisa's changes But I wouldn't know anything about it. I I I would unknowingly overwrite Lisa 's changes. But now that we have this alert, I can be more careful before saving my changes.

Speaker 4: For example, I can reopen this in a new tab. And yeah, now we see Lisa 's new edits. And we can merge the two edits by uh, for example, copying The same updates I made earlier here. Now I click save. And this time I didn't get a notification because I have reloaded the editor with the latest version from Visa. And by the way, the notification also works if you are the one who made a new version, for example, in another window. So if I go back to the original tab , I can now see my own face at the top right and it says that I saved a new version in

Speaker 4: another window. So if you have multiple windows of the same page open and you may have different edits This will have help remind you of that. And so there you have it. Hopefully this will help you collaborate more effectively. And we plan on making further improvements on collaborative editing in the future, which may include Autosafe. So if you like this feature and would like us to make more improvements in this area you can consider sponsoring us so we can bring them to you faster. And that's it for me. Thanks. And now I'm going to hand over to Matthew for Streamfield Migration Improvements.

Speaker 5: Thank you, Sage. So yes, today I'd like to talk about an optimization we've made to migrations when working with Dreamfield. This is a piece of work that really took shape at the Wagtail Space Conference in the Netherlands earlier this year, where one of the talks touched on this problem and workarounds for it, which set me thinking about how this could really be improved. So it's always nice when this sort of getting together and uh and yeah, discussing things can uh lead to uh to improvements like this. So Streamfield is a very flexible feature in terms of how you use it uh and how much control you hand over to editors. And this is something you might encounter if uh if if you're

Speaker 5: um if if you've given editors a lot of freedom over page construction And so here we have a palette of available content blocks like call to action And uh yeah, image with caption and within there you've got various uh options for the kind of content you want to enter there. This is a pretty modest selection here and uh and on a well-established site there might well be uh Dozens of these as uh site has grown and more use cases come up over time and uh But uh in this case we'd like to give our editors some more control over layout, so

Speaker 5: as well as having this option for a single column. We've also got sort of several options for left, right, sidebars. And within each of these, uh you have the same set of available content blocks. And as you develop this sort of thing, you'll be creating migrations which keep a snapshot of the stream field definition as it existed in a particular point in time. And when you have a structure like this where you have the blocks being editable at various different points in the structure, then this migration file ends up for pretty big.

Speaker 5: Because this uh this definition takes the form of a tree, so if we take this uh this colour choice as an example, uh that's just defined once in the code, but then when that gets translated into a migration, you'll see that ever on every occurrence of where this can appear, you'll see this red, blue, green, yellow, sort of written out in full again. And that means that this whole migration file Even though we've only defined like five or six different block types, just the repetition means that we've ended up with a migration file that's uh nearly to 8,000 lines long. And on disk that is uh adding up to like nearly 600 kilobytes. And this isn't just a cosmetic problem.

Speaker 5: These large files can take a long time to process. And in extreme cases, that can consume all of your server's memory, making it impossible to run these migrations. But if I now switch over to Whittail 6. 2 and I'll recreate this migration and so I just need to delete the old one and recreate that and that'll just take a few seconds And now we can see that's uh gone down to just 30k, so that's uh about uh yeah less than a tenth of the size, more like a twentieth of the size.

Speaker 5: And That's because we're now representing it as a a graph where these blocks can be reused. So uh In rather than having to repeat this definition every time, so we've given this uh choice block for colours an ID of two and then that will get sort of referred to any uh Anything else that refers to that. So that means that uh yeah, yeah, we avoid all of that repetition. And in practice, you won't need to worry about that detail. All you need to know is that you're you're now free to go wild with your stream field definitions without hitting this brick wall. So yep, that's me.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Matthew. That's excellent. I'm sure there are a lot of developers out there who'd be very happy to get those improvements on their existing projects. I see some thumbs up from Cameron in particular already. We have a bit of time for questions. I'll get started with one we received in the chat and Q<unk>A, which is from Craig and Caleb. Matthew, what are the requirements for concurrent leading notifications? Behind the scenes that it use web sockets, polling, how does it work?

Speaker 5: Yeah. Okay, so uh yeah, the uh the the editing notifications at the moment that's powered just by a plane to background request um every I think it's every 10 seconds. Uh but so there's there's no additional requirements as far as WebSockets uh right now. That's just uh a plain uh plain HTTP request. So yeah, no new requirements there.

Speaker 2: Thank you. And uh I see some questions in the chat about whether this comes with a cursor to show collaboration. Uh Sage, could you clarify the UI exactly? What's the extent of the collaborative features?

Speaker 4: Right. So we're not at the point where we have real time collaborative editing just yet where you can see each other's cursor and like see the changes live. So we currently only have the notifications of of the presence of other users. But that's definitely um in our roadmap for future enhancements. So in the future we'd like to have the one of the most obvious things is autosave. And once we get on the safe, we'll also try to get into the real-time collaborative editing. But we have quite a long way to go. So we appreciate if you if you are excited about these features, consider sponsoring us.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Sage. I dropped the link relevant for this in the chat. And we'll move on in interest of time. And I'll have the pleasure to introduce our special guests for this webinar, Cameron from the Freedom of the Press Foundation. I'll just be very quick and say Funero the Press Foundation, they're the kind of like-minded organizations we're super happy to work with in open source and uh get their sponsorship for a Wactail package. that Cameron will introduce further. Over to you, Cameron.

Speaker 6: Uh hi, yes. Uh my name is my name is Cameron Hingbinakan, pronouncing him. I am a web developer for the aforementioned uh Freedom of the Press Foundation, a US based but sort of global with global reach. Um organization that builds secure communications platforms that are used by journalists and their sources to keep them safe. Um and monitors press freedom violations in the US and engages in advocacy work to help protect the public's right to know. It's a brief summary of what we do. Um and we are big users of Wagtail and we're big fans of it. And we um the what kind of led us to

Speaker 6: engage um over this uh newsletter package was essentially the demise of twitter the um and wanting to have the as that platform has changed And the audience that we used to be able to reach for fundraising and for just general communications has also changed and this caused us to do some introspection and want to have more control over our communications medium. And essentially we looked for looked towards email for that. The the and our goal in this was to make sending a newsletter as easy for our editors and our writers as it

Speaker 6: as editing a Wagtail page was. And that was essentially that's that's this That's this project in a nutshell. So I'll maybe, with that, I'll pass it off to um Alex to talk about how that what that looks like. And we're I'm I'm sure that you all will be just as pleased about it as uh we were once you see how it works.

Speaker 7: Thank you very much, Cameron. I hope to live up to the expectations that you're setting So, okay, hello, I'm Alex Morega, senior developer at Torchbox, and I'm going to talk to you about this package, Wagtail-newsletter , that we've built. So Yeah, first of all, we're gonna look at when you would use this package, like the use case, how we are tackling the challenge of producing HTML that does work across email clients. Which is non-trivial, how the email gets sent out, and then a demo showing how to prepare and how to send out a campaign. All right, so what does the package do?

Speaker 7: Well, you create regular Wagtail pages in your CMS using the powerful content editor in Wagtail. preview them as a newsletter in the live preview panel. And then when you're happy with the content, send them out as an actual newsletter. email subscribers. And optionally, since you have created a page in the CMS, you can also publish it as a regular page in the website. So if it's a news article, then this is a handy way to have it both on the news site and also Send it out to subscribers. So writing in HTML that looks right in in emails clients is notoriously difficult. So we went shopping

Speaker 7: and um For this we can use MGML, which is a markup language that is designed to represent email content. And Wagtail Newsletter supports it out of the box Using the MRML library to render the markup into actual HTML. And MRML is a re-implementation of the official MGML library in Rust. So it's fast and does not require a Node. js runtime on the server. But of course all this is optional. You are free to handcraft your HTML emails, you some other method to render the HTML if if if that's what you prefer Now, Wagtail Usator is designed to support

Speaker 7: multiple campaign services with a pluggable architecture for the backends. Right now there is only support for MailChimp because it's fairly popular And fairly representative of what these APIs for marketing email campaigns generally tend to look like So I'm going to do a quick demo. It's going to cover configuring the recipients for a campaign, preparing and testing the content. Sending out the campaign and then tracking the performance of the emails. So first of all, in MailChimp in my account I have an audience which is called Newsletter Subscribers

Speaker 7: and I have a handful of subscribers here And from White Tail I can go to settings, newsletter recipients, and basically Tell Wibetail about the audience that I have in MailChimp. So it's doing an API call, fetching a list of audiences, and then I can select the one that I'm interested in here and then maybe even choose a segment if I have segments defined in in the email provider and I'm going to choose this one member segment for test And now this this audience is saved, so I can reuse it for multiple campaigns. It's defined once. And if I'm feeling inclined to

Speaker 7: like add more features. I can even have a custom model for this audience. Add more fields if that's the use case for for my website. Right, and then actually for for the actual content, I'm going to steal the this this recent what uh this week in Wagtail newsletter Just gonna copy the content here and then create a page in WhiteTale I'm gonna take this bit and use it as a title And then I want to recreate the images.

Speaker 7: I already uploaded them in the site, so I have them here, one for the header, and then one here for Yeah, here in the middle. All right And you can see on the right the preview is updating live. So this is the web version of the page. It's a very simple template. It's part of the demo project in and in the source code. And this is uh if I were to publish the page, this is what the page would look like on the web. But here at the bottom, there is preview mode, I can switch to newsletter. And now I see the same page, the same content, but rendered with the MJML template.

Speaker 7: And of course it's responsive. I can make sure it looks sort of right And then I go back to the top to the newsletter tab. I choose the recipients that I have defined earlier. I don't have to set a subject because it's going to use the title as a default And then maybe some preview text here, which is going to show up in email uh email readers, email clients as a sort of teaser And then, okay, before actually sending it out to people, I'm going to send a test email to myself. Alright, so this did a couple of things. First of all, it saved the page as a draft.

Speaker 7: Then it uploaded the content into MailChimp as a new campaign. And then made an API call to MailChimp to send a test message. So it's using the email delivery infrastructure as as much as possible. So we can have a good, a proper test here. And I switched to my email client. You can see here the teaser text. And yeah, this looks about right. We can we can send it to our subscribers now. So go to the newsletter tab again. And here I have a couple of options. I can send a campaign now. And this warns me, look, you're gonna spam one person, be careful Or I can schedule the campaign for later.

Speaker 7: So I can yeah, pick a date on Friday, pick a time. Probably not a good time for sending newsletters, but yeah. But for now I'm going to send the campaign immediately just so we can see what happens Okay, so again, it saved the draft of the page in case there were changes. It uploaded the content again to MailChimp in case there were changes. And the campaign is now sending. So in the newsletter tab, I should be able to see the campaign status here in place of the buttons. It's sending. And yeah, if I refresh the page, it should say, okay, send to one person I should have it here in my inbox.

Speaker 7: Yes I do. Maybe I'll click on a link. And okay, if we refresh the page, we should. Yeah, we will see statistics in time. These take take a minute to um to yeah traverse the events pipeline of Gelchimp. Ah there we go, one open one click. Okay, so that's it for the demo. I hope you enjoyed it. The package is open source on GitHub with documentation on how to install it and how to use it. Please check it out, give us feedback, we welcome contributions and sponsorship

Speaker 7: Maybe to add more campaign backends or maybe add a fancy AI assistant to help write digest newsletter emails drawing from multiple articles on your website. Why not? And also check out our own newsletter, This Week in White Tail, for events, features, and adventures on White Tail. Thank you very much.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Alex, and thank you again for the Freedom of the Press Foundation for sponsoring this work. I can't understate how amazing it is for us. when people see a need for tools like this in the context of Twitter exploding or otherwise and make this happen in open source rather than just for their projects. um jumping straight over to questions. There is a lot of questions in the chat, lots of interest. Alex, can you clarify as far as backends, is this Mailchip only or does it support other options? And for MailChip, which subscription level is required?

Speaker 7: Right. So at the moment it's MailChimp only, but uh it the the the library is written in such a way that it's easy to plug in code that supports other campaign providers. Either we we could so first of all you could implement it in your own project if you have a very specific need. implement of like four methods in a class and it's fairly straightforward. And over time we hope to add more of these to the packet itself. And the second question about was about Mailchimp subscription levels. So the demo I just did was with a free MailChimp account. So no subscription needed.

Speaker 7: The schedule campaign feature does require a paid account. Um they have yeah, they I best go to their website to see uh yeah, pricing and Thank you.

Speaker 2: See more questions relating to mailchimp, which I'll probably leave for the chat. And Scott asks whether there's any plans to support newsletter emails based on multiple pages. So multiple pages. coming together for the one email.

Speaker 7: So there is um Yeah, there is this idea sort of wishful thinking that we would like to support this. There's no concrete plans, but uh yeah, get in touch and uh yeah, we maybe we figure something out

Speaker 2: Excellent. And I'll take a last one. Caleb asks, is this a MockTelNest package or core?

Speaker 7: Uh it's not Wagtail core, so it's not part of Wagtail itself. Um at the moment uh we're going to support it for uh correct me if I'm wrong, at least couple of major versions of Wagta of uh new releases of Wagtail um but it could be that at some point it transitions to Wagtail nests. We'll see

Speaker 2: Thank you very much. And uh yeah, we'll take all of the other questions in the chat. And I'll hand straight over to Jake, who's going to show us a new way to get Wacta websites started and deployed.

Speaker 8: Thank you Thibaut. So yes, my name is Jake. I'm a senior systems engineer at Torchbox. I'm also on the core, security and performance teams for Wagtail itself. And today I want to talk a bit about getting started with Wagtail. So if you want to just play around with Wagtail, get it up and running, there is the Bakery Demo site, which is a Nice and easy way, pre-built Wagtail thing you can set up locally and then it's it's a Wagtail site about bread, which is great. Um But it's just that. It's an example of a Wagtail site. It's not really meant to be built upon. We see people do it, but that's not really what it's designed for. And in the last few months, Torchbox have created a news site template, something that is actually designed to get you off the ground, so to speak.

Speaker 8: As is, it is a production grade Wagtail site that gets spat out of a template. You can use it exactly as it is, you can deploy it to somewhere and then start writing your content with no further code changes. Or you can use it as a baseline and adapt it to whatever it is that you need and then release it to the world. And in contrast, Bakery Demo is not designed to do that. This template is designed to do that right from the get-go And so what I want to do is if the demo gods will allow me to, I'm going to get this template up and running and then show you it deployed in production. So what I have here is an editor. I have a virtual environment that has Wagtail installed, and it is 6. 2. 2, so we have the latest and greatest.

Speaker 8: Now, Wagtail has had, in fact, for quite a while, when you run Wagtail Start to create a new Wagtail project, you can give it a template. Using the dash h template command. So here we have a very long command which will create our Wagtail template, our Wagtail project even. So here we're giving it a template URL, which in this case points to the Wagtail News template repository on GitHub, which is fully free and open source. We then give it a project name, in this case my new site, because I suck at naming things. And then the little dot at the end says to create the new Wagdile site in the current working directory. So if I run this, it takes just a few seconds. If I said just a few seconds.

Speaker 8: Oh, this is gonna be fun. Okay. The terminal is doing what it's doing, but we can see on the left hand side here that our files have been created successfully. We've got A bunch of things there to make it a fully fledged Wagtail site. We've got the under the My News site folder, we have all of the files that actually build the Wagtail server side bit. And under static source and in fact in static compiled as well, we have all of the front-end components needed to actually make the front-end side of it So I'm gonna let that finish doing what it's doing. I'm then going to in another terminal hopefully get it up and running. So Step one, we need to install the the templates

Speaker 8: dependencies. That's fun. Uh There we go. Right. Install the pri the project's dependencies. Let that run for a second. We then need to In here we have a nice make file which lets um create in the template to be nice and simple so we can run make load data. All of these things are documented in the README, so you don't need to watch this back to follow it along. Everything is fully documented. And so with the migrations run, collect static being run, we can then do

Speaker 8: an X. py run server. And as if by magic, we have our new site running locally, all ready to go. This is a fully fledged Wagtail site with some basic content in there. If you want to take this, deploy it to your hosting provider of choice and start adding content, you can. If you want to go back to the code, start tweaking things, installing packages, maybe you want a newsletter, then you can do that as well. All designed there. And that's kind of that is it. That is the template as it is. You have a Wagtail site there ready to make your own without any bread. But this is all running all on my local machine, which hopefully you don't have access to.

Speaker 8: You need to actually get it deployed somewhere. And so for this, our template at the very least has built-in support for deploying to Flight. io. Blood. io is a really nice posting company for very easily and quickly deploying projects and getting them out there. If you have other preferences, you can very easily use them. It is just a Docker project. There's only a small config file that ties it to Flat. io, and so it'd be very, very simple to take this template and deploy it to somewhere like DustroOcean, Heroku, Kubernetes, or any other hosting provider it is that you prefer. Now, for the sake of time, I'm not going to show you the process of deploying it from my logo machine right the way into production. It takes a few more minutes than we have time to go through in

Speaker 8: in this webinar, but I can do a Blue Peter style. Here's one I made earlier that is actually running on um Flight Flight. io. Um and you can actually visit this website now. I have changed the admin password for obvious reasons, but you can go here and see the news template running in all of its glory. Um and it really did just take a few minutes to go from running on my machine to running on the internet for everyone else to see. And the configuration is up to date, it's running the latest Wagtail. And it is secure and production great and ready to go. And that is by design. And all you need to do is follow the very small set of steps that are in the project's README. And then you'll be good to go. And that's it.

Speaker 8: In just a few minutes, you will have gone from what is this Wagtail thing right up to I have a Wagtail site ready to have content added running in production. in just a few minutes. And if that is how you want to use it, that's great. You can log in to the YXL admin, you can start adding content and publishing it right there. Remove some of the example bits and you're good to go. But as well, like I said, if you want to go back, if you want to use this as the foundational template rather than a starting point, you can do all of that as well. And you can develop those additional features on top of it. Now this template is just hopefully the first of its kind. Um they just there is nothing torchbox or wagtail. org specific about this. Anyone can make templates. They don't even need to be public if you'd like templates for

Speaker 8: maybe some of your internal projects, all you need to do is make a template and start running with it. And hopefully with more people using these templates and building some of these templates, depending on what it is they need or what templates they would like to create We can hopefully raise the bar for people to get um for it to be easier and quicker to get started with building MikeTel sites. And with that, I'm gonna hand back over to Thibaut to see if we have any questions.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Jake. This is all very exciting. It's a very common pain point in a Django and Wagtail World deployments. So really happy to see us having a built-in way to address this Uh we only have two questions. Um Garrett asks whether we can have access to your machine.

Speaker 8: Uh no. Um as this as one of the people on the security team for my company, 100% no. I don't know why I'm nodding. No.

Speaker 2: And GCI Tech asks uh whether this works, this template works with Peep as well as what you showcased.

Speaker 8: Uh with pip, sorry.

Speaker 2: Yep.

Speaker 8: Yes. So yeah, I've just used UV because I think it runs faster. Um there is nothing tied to UV with it. There are no other external dependencies. You need Python, you need Wagtail, and that is it.

Speaker 2: Thanks, Jake. And we have a bit more time so I'll ask a question of my own. uh any do you have any thoughts on whether we should include other built-in options than fly. io directly in the template

Speaker 8: Yeah, I've had lots of discussions with Tom Dyson about this and sort of the right balance because on the one hand, the more providers that we add into at least this template It means it becomes much more useful for lots of people because they can use a one-click equivalent deployment to whatever their tool is The downside is that it means that we have to maintain potentially a bunch of different integrations for a bunch of different things. Um at um Waghole Space earlier in the year, Ton Dyson sort of proposes idea of having sort of a manage. ply managed. ply deploy approach where you can just point it at a thing and maybe that has some tooling for each of the providers, so you only have to maintain it in one place rather than potentially for every single template. I think the Django community as a whole could benefit from certain things like that for getting up and running.

Speaker 8: But at this time it's probably tied to Flight. io for now. But this is all free and open source stuff. If you like our template, but think actually I'd like it to be on Heroku and for it to be just as easy for me, then by all means, let's open some pull requests. Let's make everything better together.

Speaker 2: Thank you, Jake. I really like that mindset. And uh we do have Tom here in the chat with us today. Tom usually MCs those webinars, so very happy to hear him mentioned. And uh yeah, Tom, if you want to share more thoughts about this in the chat. You can definitely use your inputs for this. And yeah, with the questions over, I'll uh hand over to myself to give you a few updates about our upcoming Wacta 6. 3 release, which is due to be released in a couple weeks in uh early November. Um and I thought I'd start us off with uh some things that developers will definitely love. which is formal support for the latest versions of Python and Django in this release. So just to be crystal clear, we already support

Speaker 2: the latest Python and Django in the current release of Wagtail we test with those versions well ahead of them actually being released for general consumption. So all this release will do is formalizing our support for those versions. And um yeah, we love to uh support these right on schedule because we do see them come up with lots of features that are useful for projects out there. Personal highlights will be the Python 3. 13 early support for a just-in-time compiler, which shows a lot of potential to make Python much more energy efficient and much faster. And uh yeah, moving over to uh Wactel features, I'll move straight over to a demo of our latest dashboard enhancements.

Speaker 2: So we're now looking at the Wactail 6. 3 dashboards. There's quite incremental changes, people who have seen the dashboard before will be right at home. We're iterating on this design for a few reasons. First off, we want to make it much more powerful as far as navigating the CMS. The big change in this release is the addition of a search bar straight from the dashboard that takes people straight to our pages search, searching across the whole of the sites. and making it possible for people to move between tree navigation of the Wagtail pages and just flat navigation with filters. People love this. This is directly based on everyone's feedback. And for the listings below, we've worked really hard on mobile support for those listings.

Speaker 2: So I'll resize my browser window to simulate what it would look like on a mobile device. And this is a layout that we spent quite a bit of time making sure works well on mobile. I'm really happy about this because we do have quite a few users out there who manage their websites from their mobile devices. Moving over to the next feature I want to showcase in the page editor for 6. 3. It hasn't changed too much just at first glance. But if I was to uh head over to my macOS system settings and the UI settings in particular I'll demonstrate how Wagtel now reacts to this increased contrast setting that is built into macOS as well as quite a few other

Speaker 2: mobile and desktop operating systems these days. And right away as I toggle this back on and off, you can see how the Wagtail UI reacts to make the color contrast a tad sharper. and also to make it much more obvious which elements are interactive on this screen. And that's something that we've worked on over the last few weeks based on feedback from our partially cited users at a UK charity called RNIB and beyond. as well as the research from our accessibility team. There are very few bits of software out there that have explicit support for those system UI settings and we're very happy to be able to ship this in the next release and hopefully iterate over this

Speaker 2: over the next few releases. And with 6. 3 out of the way, I think it's useful for us to look at the Wattel roadmap People might not know we have a roadmap with all of our upcoming features as well as the features for which we require sponsorship to proceed. This is looking quite far ahead into the future, but we already do have quite a solid lineup of features for the February release of Wracktail. And I want to showcase two in particular, the blocks preview and the blocks drag and drop. People might not know that we have very active community discussions on GitHub. And it's not necessarily a matter of finding sponsorship for those features, just finding feedback is immensely helpful

Speaker 2: for us to decide how to go about them. So the block preview, I'll give you a UI mock-up so you know what I'm talking about. We're now in the CMS. in the page editor, in the block chooser, and here I have to select which type of block I want to add in my contents And it can be quite hard to tell which blocks do what based on the naming and icons only. So we're introducing those image previews as well as description of what the block is for, which we hope will make it easier for users. to know exactly what they're using and what's the most appropriate block before they actually try and adding content to the page. In a similar fashion to make it faster for people to manage their websites, the stream field feature with block-based editing, we're going to introduce drag and drop reordering of the blocks.

Speaker 2: as well as copy-paste to move blocks from page to page. And again, that's something where feedback is quite critical for us to understand exactly how people expect this to work. And yeah, I believe we have uh quite a bit of time for questions as well. I'd be interested to hear if anyone has questions about those upcoming features. Taking a look over the chats, I see a comment about the mobile experience. It has definitely improved. It's something where uh it's always tricky for us to decide where this is worth the investment or no. but we do see consistently people using Wactail on mobile devices. So yeah definitely happy to have made an investment in the case of the dashboard. I see Gareth asking whether 6.

Speaker 2: 3 is the next LTS release. The answer is yes. We always release our long-term support versions on a calendar basis the November release being the LTS one, which is support for a whole year's worth of um bug fix and security updates. I see Caleb asks copy paste entire blocks from page to page. So Caleb, good question. The definition of a block and exactly how we support that is still up for grabs. I believe the intent is for us to make it so if a given block type is supported in one page or one part of a page. will try and be able to guarantee that you can paste it anywhere else that block type is supported across your sites

Speaker 2: and potentially other sites as well. It's a bit tricky for us to decide for this um how much people would expect Wagtail to uh make room in cases where there might be issues with the copy pasting, whether we should still try to move some of the content over or whether it should only copy paste if we can guarantee Compatibility. Um I see we have one more question from Marcus. Suggest a new UI feature for the WacttailBlocks admin area. The best way to submit suggestions like this is either as a feature request in our GitHub issues tracker or otherwise if it's related to something else, definitely worthwhile to go towards those discussion threads.

Speaker 2: So for blocks in particular, I would highly recommend this thread I showed earlier, which has us going through all sorts of related stream field blocks improvements. Okay, I think I'm uh holding the mic for too long here. So I'll uh leave things be and go through the other questions in the chat and uh hand over to my colleague Megan, who's gonna give us some community news.

Speaker 4: All right, y'all. Go in.

Speaker 3: All right , gonna share a little update with y'all today.

Speaker 4: Um, we did a lot of events this year. It was fun. We had not one but two Wagtail space events, one in the US and one in the Netherlands. Thank you again to Four Digits for hosting that one. Those events have now

Speaker 3: over 30 talks about Wagtails. So if you want to level up your Wagtail knowledge, definitely check out those playlists on our YouTube channel. And on top of Wagtail Space, we also had many community members represent Wagtail at other conferences this year, including DjangoCon EU, PyCon US, and DjangoCon US. It was great seeing how many people came out to teach workshops and contribute time at Sprints. It was just fantastic catching up with folks this year. So Another thing that's going on is me and Vocor team member Cynthia Kaiser, who's on this call. Hi, Cynthia are experimenting with doing a virtual community collaboration session every week.

Speaker 3: Right now it's Wednesday from 3. 30 to 5. 30 Eastern Time. Uh but you know the t the length and things may change. But next week we're going to be doing a bug hunt with the release candidate. So if you have any interest in helping us see if there are any bugs. that we should report back. Definitely send me a private message for the details or look for a link to that in the follow-up email. Now what's up next? So we I'll be at All Things Open in Raleigh next week, Raleigh, North Carolina, along with Don Wages. That'll be our last kind of semi-official event for the year. And then we're looking for suggestions on where we should be next year. And we definitely want to expand

Speaker 3: via. Beyond kind of typical developer conferences, we would love to like attend events on accessibility, sustainability, government leadership, public service.

Speaker 7: If you have any events that you really enjoy and think that we should be at, please drop us a line. We would love to know about that. Also, I just wanted to let y'all know that we have shifted some things in how we focus on social media.

Speaker 3: The social media landscape is changing pretty much every day. So here's a reminder on where to find us on social media now.

Speaker 4: You can find us on Slack, on Mastodon, and now Blue Sky as of last week. And Wagtail is also pretty active on LinkedIn as well. So thank you so much, everybody, for all the great events that we had this year. It was great to see your faces, and I hope to meet more of our community members next year.

Speaker 1: Thank you. Thank you everybody. Thanks everyone for your brilliant questions and your enthusiasm. It's been a brilliant vibe today. And thank you to all of our speakers. Sage, Albina, Matthew, Jake, Alex, Thibaut, and Megan. And thank you, Cameron, for coming and joining us as well and contributing today. It's been great. And look, three minutes, got three minutes left. Right on time So thanks everybody. Hope to see you at the next event soon.

Speaker 2: Great to see you all.