Wagtail Lingo 101 | Wagtail terms for new users

Hey folks, Megan from the Wagtail Core Team here. I wanted to share a few different terms that we use to describe Wagtail Just because sometimes when you're new to something, it can feel like people are speaking a totally different language. And we definitely don't want people feeling left out or confused when they're using WAGT. So we're gonna go over three terms this week that are pretty common in our documentation. We're gonna talk about the Wagtail Admin, we're gonna talk about Streamfield and Streamfield blocks, and we're gonna talk about snippets. So let's take a closer look at these terms. Alright, so let's go over the Wagtail Admin first. When we talk about the Wagtail Admin, we're pretty much referring to any sort of panel or page in this section of Wagtail.

So I just got to this area of Wagtail. org by going to slash admin and logging in. That's commonly where you will find the Wagtail admin for your website or however you're editing your content. You might have a different URL, it depends on the project and how it's set up. But pretty much whenever we say go to the Wagtail admin, we're referring to this section of the website. Alright, so another term that people tend to get a little bit confused about is stream field. They're like, what does that mean exactly It usually is very intuitive once they see it. So right here I have a blog post that we recently posted for our new release of Wagtail on Wagtail. org. And so if you scroll down, you see under the body section here

that there's options to add different pieces of content to the blog post. And this section , since you can add different blocks and also move them around and adjust them with the arrows here, this whole section is a stream field and the different bits of content that you can put into the stream field are blocks. So that's what we mean when we say stream field blocks or stream field. And so like, you know, if I wanted to go ahead and add a block quote here, I could do that. I could say something like Wagtail is awesome. And then if I didn't like where I put it, I could move it around to another area.

That's that's pretty much like Streamfield is used to describe kind of the fluid nature of the content and how you can move it around. Alright, so the last little bit of wagtail lingo I'm going to explain to you today is called a snippet. So snippets are little reusable pieces of content that can be reused across your website. So typically there's a menu on the left-hand side of Wagtail that says snippets. It might be called something different on your installation. Sometimes people rename these menus to make it a little bit easier to find things But typically snippets are little chunks of content that you can reuse in all sorts of different pages. A lot of projects will put advertisements in here.

uh usually things like navigation menus. You can see in this example from Wagtail. org we have our footer menu in here and we also have our main menu in here. Another really common one you'll see is authors. Because typically, like, there's different types of content on a site. There can be uh more standard pages, there can be blogs, there could be somebody could write a guide or something like that. And rather than having to like enter the author, like say somebody wrote content for three different page types. If you instead of having to enter it in three different places, you can enter it as a snippet and then reuse it in those three different places. It makes it much more efficient to enter that information once in this area.

So that way, like say that author moves on, or say That uh you need to update your menu all across your website instead of having to change it in multiple places. You can just go to snippets and change it in one place. It's super handy. Alright, so those were three Wagtail terms that we went over today. I hope you're feeling very smart after that And if you want to learn a little bit more or want to feel even smarter about using Wagtail, highly recommend our Wagtail user guide. Please check it out at guide. wagtail. org.