Quick Video Tour of Wagtail CMS 6.4 | Drag-and-drop blocks, concurrent editing, and more!

Hello everyone, my name is Megan and I'm here to show you a quick tour of all the great new features that you can find in Wagtail CMS. So right here I have a demo project called the Wagtail Bakery. And this is the dashboard that you see when you first log in. If you're new to Wagtail, it looks, well, dashboardy. If you're not new to Wagtail, you'll notice that there are a few things that are different. For example, we've now made these areas collapsible. So if you have like Loads of pages that need moderation or something like that, and you don't want to scroll through them all, you can go ahead and collapse that and kind of reorganize things a little bit based on what needs your focus. Another thing that's super useful, especially if you're an editor

who doesn't always work on something that's in the most recent edits queue, is this big old search bar here. Uh say you had a page that you only update once a month. You can go ahead and put the name of the page right in the search bar and get to it right away. So that's the dashboard. Super useful. But we've got some other things that have changed as well. So let's go ahead and go into one of our blog posts here so I can show you a bit more about what's going on Alright, so in our blog posts here, the next feature I want to show you is some changes to our Streamfield blocks. Now, if you're not familiar with Stream Field, Stream Field essentially refers to down here in the body of the paragraph, you can add

different blocks of content according to your needs. And it's super useful because then you can mix and match images and paragraphs and block quotes, all the different things that you need to make an amazing piece of content. One thing that we added recently that was pretty heavily requested, especially by people who deal with very long pages, is the ability to make uh to copy blocks and then also to do drag and drop. So right here if you click duplicate you can duplicate blocks. And then you can move them around the page by grabbing this drag piece here. And let's go ahead and move it up some. Let's say we want to put it.

Right up here. There we go. Actually it looked like it moved down here a bit. Looks like I need to improve my aim a bit, but that's okay. Uh the point being that rather than having to use these up and down arrows, which longtime Wagtail users are pretty familiar with Instead of having to click those forever and ever and ever, now you can just drag a block to wherever you need it on the page and drop it. It's super easy. And honestly, it's one of my favorite new things. It's gonna make working with new like really long pages a lot easier. And I'm so looking forward to that. One other thing while we're looking at blocks here in the stream field that I'd like to show off, if we click on insert a block

here, you'll notice next to the block names that we now have these little eyeball symbols. And what those are are block previews. When you work with Wagtail Streamfield, it can be very easy to forget what blocks look like. And you can find yourself going back and forth. checking on the previews to make sure to to try and remember well what color was the heading type in this block or something like that. And this just makes it a whole lot easier because all you have to do is click the I and you can see an example of what the block will look like. uh without having to like create content and then go back and forth between the preview and

It just saves you a little bit of time because it reminds you what the block options are and it shows you like what you can put together on your Streamfield page. And it just makes it all the more easy to go ahead and craft content in a fantastic and beautiful way. Alright, let's migrate over from the main content area of the page and have a look at what's new in these tools on the right-hand side of the page. Now, if you're new to Wagtail, let's go ahead and give you a quick overview of what we got over here. We have an option to open up a mini-map where you can jump to specific sections of your your content again a very useful thing for long pages.

We have a collapse all option that allows you to collapse and expand your content uh to be able to find things quickly and move things around quickly. We also have a status tool uh that shows you different stats about your page and also lets you change some of the settings like privacy settings or schedule posts. Definitely a useful section. And then we have the preview tool, which shows you what your page will look like on different screen types. And also, you can add comments to your content here. And you can also take a look at your full revision history and see exactly what changes have been made to your content But the tool I want to draw your attention to most

and what we've updated most recently is our checks tool. And so this checks section contains Our accessibility checker, which includes a lot of built-in accessibility checks for common accessibility issues Right here you can see it's flagging the fact that I have an incorrect heading hierarchy within this post. Probably used an H3 where I should have used an H2. And that's not good for screen readers. So it not only flags issues like this now, but in our most recent editions, it is starting to flag things like alt text. with bad names. For example, if you have alt text that says image123. jpg, that doesn't really tell somebody with a screen reader what's in the picture, it just tells them what the file name is.

And that's Really not all that useful. So the accessibility checker now has some default tests to check for that. If you really don't like those default tests, you can always switch them on and off. The accessibility checker, like many other things in Wagtail, is highly customizable. We also added this content metrics check. It's one of the first content checks that we are planning to add to this section. And so we went ahead and added word count and reading time that'll give your content creators another tool to decide like How long do I really want to make this piece of content? Because if somebody has to sit there for a whole hour to read it, chances are they're probably not going to.

So it's one of the first little bits of content information that we're adding to the section, and we hope you'll find it useful. Alright, one of the last things that I want to show you that's really awesome in the latest version of Wagtail is the concurrent editing notifications. And that might sound like a bit of a complicated dance, but basically what that means is that if two people are working on the same piece of content, now you'll get some notifications about whether they've made any changes. So you'll notice up here that right now another user is currently viewing the same page I am. They aren't doing anything, just hanging out, just they have it open in a tab

somewhere. Uh however, if and uh pardon me because I have to do a little bit of window juggling to make this work. If they make a change over here or start making additions Uh you'll notice that it changes the notification up here and there's a little yellow circle around here and if I click here you can see now that that other user it's telling me that they have unsaved changes, which is important because if I'm working on this post as well, if I save over them, then I might get rid of their changes. Uh and it's just really, you know, this helps

prevent kind of like those overlapping saves that might be causing problems. And so again, if I go over and s as the other user, if I went ahead and saved my draft. You'll notice that once again that there is going to be another update here in the notification. Might take a little bit of uh Time for it to change here. Yes, there it goes. See now we got a big red circle which tells me that the other user has saved a brand new version of the content. And so now I know that rather than trying to overwrite this other uses

user 's new piece of content, I should just go ahead and work with the newest version possible. By going ahead and hitting refresh. It'll give you a little warning each time to remind you that if you have any unsaved changes, you're going to lose them. So you might want to copy and paste those somewhere Or you can also talk to the other user and be like, hey, um would you mind if I saved over yours? Like concurrent editing notifications give you a lot more options to make sure that people just aren't writing over each other with changes. So let's go ahead and refresh this page. And now you can see that there's a new sentence here that says yeast is awesome. Great! Grand new addition and I can go ahead and keep working on the content uh to my heart's content.

Alright, so that's it for our little quick tour today. Thank you so much for coming along with me. If you want to know more about the latest release of Wagtail, I went ahead and put a link down in the video description to our latest release blog posts. I also included a link to our latest release notes so that you can get All the nitty-gritty details about the code and update considerations, anything that would make your developer sing and dance is in that set of release notes If you're curious about Wagtail after seeing this video and you want to give it a go, I've also included a link to our news template starter kit as well. I highly recommend you give it a try. I think you'll really enjoy what you see