Two Ways to Navigate Faster in Wagtail

Hello y'all! I'm gonna be showing you some quick tricks for navigating around a piece of content inside Wagtail. And so right here we have a blog post. This was written by my colleague Tebow It is a not so subtle ask for the sponsorship for the SEO tools that we would like to add to Wagtail. So if you happen to know somebody, wink, wink, wink. I don't think I can actually wink. uh but please send them our way. Uh but this piece of content is a good example because it has a few different things in it. It has images, it has text. It has some headings, it has a video, and it's just a pretty good piece of content to demo with in this page.

So let's go over to the admin version of this page. This is what the page looks like on the back end. And kind of the traditional way to navigate around a piece of Wagtail content is to just go ahead and scroll through it and find the different blocks that you need to edit or need to rearrange and things like that. For a post that is on the shorter side like this one, that's honestly not too bad to just go ahead and use scroll. But if you're working with a much longer page or if you have some particularly chunky content or you have a lot of images or something like that, it can be a lot harder to navigate just with old-fashioned scrolling. So

a few ways to uh make this work better for you. First of all, over here we have a button that is extremely useful. It's the collapse all button. And so when I click it, it collapses all of the different sections in the page down here. So that way I know that if I want to make a change to the introduction, I can just unfold that one Make my change, fold it back up, go to the next spot that I want to make a change to. Like if I wanted to shake sh related pages, I could fold that down, fold this down. and then make my change and just collapse everything back up. Uh if I needed to for some reason like I you know this this view it doesn't really give you an idea what's inside each piece and if I can't quite remember where I put that video block

uh or something like that I can go ahead and click expand all And everything opens back up and then I can see everything again. Now this view uh here like is very useful and it at condensing things, but you don't really get as much detail as you might need, especially if you use Stream Field and Wagtail and have a lot of different blocks in there And so that's where another tool that we have called the minimap would be more useful for you. So I'm going to expand that all out. And then I'm going to open this menu right here, which is our mini-map. And so the minimap not only shows you all the different fields throughout the page, it also breaks down the body of the page with the different stream fields according to individual stream field blocks.

And so that way if you have separate blocks for your images or if you have a separate uh style block for a CTA or something like that that you need to change really quickly, you can find it a lot more easily in the mini map than you can with the collapse all function. So if I wanted to go ahead and change out this YouTube link to something newer I could go ahead and click that and it just takes me right to that. Or if I wanted to change something, one of the related pages, I can click there and it automatically takes me down to that section of the page So, those are some ways you can navigate more quickly around a piece of content inside Wagtail. I hope you find that very useful. If you'd like to learn a few more ways to be a power user in Wagtail and also get some more tips and tricks for using Wagtail,

I definitely invite you to sign up for our newsletter. Please head over to wagtail. org slash newsletter. Hand over your email address. I promise you won't regret it.