How to Customize Your Admin Settings in Wagtail

Hello, hello! I'm gonna be showing you how to customize your Wagtail admin experience this week. And so similar to having like an ergonomic mouse or an ergonomic keyboard You want to create a workspace experience in Wagtail that works best for you. So let's go on down to the left hand side here to the account profile for my account. And in our account profile we have some pretty typical profiley things, uh name, email address, profile picture. Preferred language, my time zone, things like that. But what I really want to draw your attention to is this section right here under theme preferences. And so

there are different options for how Wagtail looks and how it is organized on pages. And so I'm somebody who gets migraines and honestly staring at blaring white screens is not good for my brain or my eyes. Uh so I commonly use dark mode and so you have three options here. You can have it work with the system default, which mine is defaults to dark. And so it would be dark mode for me if I chose this one. But just to make sure that it actually stays in dark mode, I usually select the dark option right here. And if I click save, that'll refresh it, and now we're in dark mode. And so not only is this a little easier on the eyes for people who have vision or

neurological issues like me It can also be a little bit better for the environment and uses a little less energy in your monitor. Just, you know, a little bonus to think about right there. So another thing that you can do if you're somebody who needs a little bit more contrast in your display, you might have a visual issue or a visual disability. And so you can go ahead and select under contrast the more contrast option right here. And if you save that , What you'll see is now we have like definite more defined icons on the page. Also the boxes are a little bit sharper. The text is a little bit easier to see.

And ultimately it just provides a much stronger contrast on the page. I'm not someone who particularly needs that, at least not yet. So I'm gonna go ahead and have it go back to the system default on the next save. But what I want to draw our attention to before we do that is the density setting And so similar to how Gmail offers you a condensed view, we have a mode in Wagtail called snug mode And so if we select Snug Mode here, click save, you're not really gonna know notice any huge differences right away on this page here, but if we head back to our dashboard and go to uh look at some items here

you'll notice that there is a little less space in between the items here it's just a little bit more condensed fits a few more items on the page. And I'm gonna go ahead and bring up a blog post here. And this also just has it's a little bit squished down uh without being like too uh squash on top of each other. It just like gives you a bit more space. Um like it just does more with the space. That's that's what I wanted to say. It's most notable in my opinion when you go to one of the listing pages right here. This is our listing page for our blog on Wagtail. org. And you'll see that there's just a lot more items on this page than there normally would be without Snug Mode.

Alright, so that's Snug Mob. And one other thing that you can customize to make your workspace work for you using the account settings. is if you go into notifications, you have a few different options about how to handle email notifications in Wagtail. So if you want to receive notifications about when a page is submitted for moderation. If you're a moderator, that's very useful, might prompt you to go do a review. You can also get notifications for whether a page is approved or rejected. Dun dun dun. You the sad trombone. But probably the one that's most common for people to switch off is the comments notifications because when you're working with multiple people on a single piece of

content and they're doing a lot of comments back and forth, it can definitely build up in your inbox. So that is probably the one that most people would change. Alright, so those were some tips on how to customize your Wagtail admin experience. I hope you found them useful. If you want more useful tips about Wagtail and want to learn more ways to become a power user Please, please, please sign up for our newsletter. Go to Wagtail. org slash newsletter. Sign up. I promise you won't regret it.