Quick Video Tour of Wagtail CMS 7.3 | Autosave, block settings, and more!

Hey everybody, Wagtail 7. 3 is here and y'all know what that means. Autosave is here Yeah! Never gonna lose my work again. Never gonna lose my work again. Woo, woo, woo, woo, woo, woo! Alright, seriously, um, besides autosave, we do have some other great features that I want to share with you, especially since it's been a minute since I've recorded one of these videos. So let's dive in. Alright, one other quick programming note. My chronic migraine has been really bad recently. And so I'm gonna be wearing these glasses during recording. Uh, and that's why I look like Cyclops. Okay. Alright, welcome to the staging site for Wagtail.

org where I have Wagtail 7. 3 installed. And I'm gonna go ahead and show you autosave. Uh, you know, so say I just wanted to change the title of this blog post from Badgers Are the Greatest to Badgers Are the Bestest. And if you blinked, you might have missed it, but up here uh is where the autosave widget is and you'll notice it do a little spinny dance and then a check mark will appear to confirm that everything has been saved. One other thing I want to mention is that if you have two people working on the same page, the concurrent editing notifications We'll definitely still warn you here if there are different changes being saved to the page and they'll help you decide like

which changes do you absolutely want to keep. Um, so don't worry if you happen to be working on something then your boss is jumping in on it and suddenly you know there's conflicting versions. You know, worse comes to worse, you can always go to the history here and look at all the histories and do some comparisons and if you need to like revert back and forth a bit. Uh that's that can definitely help you out there Alright, one other thing I'll say is that if you start a totally new blog post like you know Wagtail 7. 3 is amazing. Um, you know, this will automatically save. Uh so you can just start stuff, even if I get distracted and I'm opening up four different tabs, um, you know, and I thought of this amazing title.

Uh, you know, it'll still show up right in the dashboard here. You can see it just automatically saved it right there. Um so I don't have to worry about even kind of losing those ideas anymore, which is really, really great. Um Let's go back into our blog post here. So one other thing that I wanted to show you is we did some updates to how images are organized within Wagtail. So you know when I do an image selection now, so not only do I have uh the option to look through images in kind of this block format here, I can now use a list layout instead of the grid. And so I get like a bit more of a condensed information

and also I get some data on like when the image was created and what the usage is. So those views now appear wherever you do image choosing. Also, you can find it in the main image library right here. Uh the image library also has a bit more added functionality to it in that you can also sort things according to those columns. Uh so now you can like, you know, organize things according to usage. Uh you can see how old the images are and things like that. This is super useful for library clean out. It's gonna be such a game changer for stuff like that. Uh one last thing that I want to mention uh in the UI here is Wagtail 7.

3 now comes with the option to add what are called block settings in Streamfield blocks. And this is an example from the Wagtail Bakery demo. We have a custom block quote here. This is a block that is specifically made for the blog. It's not a standard block. So you know there are different ways that you can set up a block quote block in Wagtail and everybody does it a little bit differently. So for this block quote, uh we gave users some settings that, you know, maybe they might not use them all the time. uh but they have like you know the chance to change uh the theme like the coloring of the words uh or they can change the text size uh from between default and large

Um and they honestly might not use these settings a whole lot, and that's one of the reasons why we gave uh developers the option to make this collapsible for their users. Because otherwise these would just be open all the time and they'd be taking up a ton of space. Alright, those are kind of the big shiny objects that I have to show you in the UI. As usual, we have a lot of great small features that I didn't have time to go over. Definitely check out all the details in our release notes. I'll put a link down in the video description. description. One thing I definitely want to highlight before I let you go is that we have made it easier now for you to take our developer documentation and our Wagtail user guide and convert that into LLMS dot

text. And that's the format that makes it easier for large language models to understand the context. So if you're using AI for your Wagtail projects, hey, this could be something that's very useful for you. Alright, as usual, please uh let us know if you find any issues and if you have any feedback, we always love to hear it. Go forth, enjoy your autosave