Video Tour of Wagtail 8.0

Hey internet, it is good to see your faces. I am so happy today to share with you an update on Wagtail 8. 0, which is our latest release of Wagtail. And this is a big release. We have given you a lot of tools that will help you prepare for a more automated future. uh including a write API that I'm gonna dig into here. And but I just wanted to spend a moment to reflect on the reason why we did this. And the reason we did this is because we did a lot of deep thinking recently and created a whole new product strategy around the fact that this future content is going to be a more automated one and one that's likely going to involve more AI and more AI agents.

Already we're starting to see some proof of that. Back in June, Cloudflare reported that there are more bots on the internet right now than there are humans And the idea that peak human traffic may have been achieved is one that we're going to have to adapt to as content publishers and content creators. And so we wanted to make sure that everybody had the tools to uh take advantage of these AI advances if they wanted to. And also, we want to make sure that people feel empowered to prepare for this future where you have to think about what machines want from your content as well as humans. Alright, let's have a look at the demo, but first I'm gonna put my Ragarine glasses on. Alright, so one of the biggest things that we've added to Wagtail in our 8.

0 release This is a write API. Yes, uh the new version of the Wagtail API is version 3. Not only do you have write functions in this API, which is totally brand new, but there are a lot of different content functions in here that give you the chance to update image content, work with document content, you can move different pieces and content around the website and It basically gives you a bunch of different functions that if you decided that you wanted to integrate Wagtail with another workflow outside of Wagtail. Or if you wanted an agent to do some automatic functions for you or to be able to put content directly into Wagtail, having this API is going to be a great tool for you.

And even if the AI were to go away, like you know, this integration offers you a lot of different options for automating your content workflows and gives you more options for using more tools with it. Just to show you kind of a quick demo here, I uh made a uh demo script using a demo version of Wagtail. org. And so Just to show you real quick, like when I updated the function for our blog page, our blog page function, one of the things that I had to do in this was add fields that decide like basically tell Wagtail, hey, uh we want to add an API field and then we want to make it writable And

so this is one way to give you a layer of control over which fields are going to be writable and which pieces of content will be writable versus others. Uh and so, you know, if you don't want like an AI agent or a automated workflow or anything writing over any particular content fields, if you want to protect certain things. This is one more layer of protection that Wagtail 's new API approach offers you. And I actually really like that You know, one of the other things you can do, and you should totally not do what I did for this demo, I just created a new super user. You should totally create a user that is not an admin at all if you're going to be experimenting with like letting OpenClaw or any sort of AI agent run uh you know

these functions on your site. So totally like permissions are something that can help you out there as well. I'll make another video in the future to go over the details of how I did all this, but I'm just gonna go ahead and uh run this demo here I have uh you know an API token here uh that is you know now out in the public world, but since this is a local demo, I don't think that that'll be a huge risk. I'm never going to use this API key again. One other thing you'll notice in this command is that I have a draft only flag in there because you can actually have content published straight away through the API. But one of the other things you can do is you can have it set to publish a draft instead of going live. So that way what you can do, uh so let's go ahead and run this.

and we'll watch it go through its thing. Maybe I'll uh scroll up a bit here so you can see what it did. Yeah, the token worked. We had some images get uploaded and everything looks like it went went through pretty well in the demo script here. And then uh just a little confirmation that it isn't live. So if we go over to our um copy of Wagtail. org here and my local copy here and let's go ahead and hit refresh. You'll see that there is a new blog post here called Fun Facts About Birds. And when I click on it, you'll also notice that when we look at its draft state here So let's go ahead and look at the status here. You'll see that it is not published yet.

It is currently only a draft And so and this is the name of the user that I created here for API test. So, you know, totally create a more secure user than I did for this this one-off demo. You definitely need to be very careful about all the permissions that you give these. uh types of things. Like, you know, like, because what I just did could be done by an AI agent uh versus just a one-off local script that I wrote. So, you know, we can see here that it went ahead and added the added this whole blog post here about birds and has different blocks and you can uh build things in Streamfield One other cool thing that you can do that I didn't demo here is that you can have different input in HTML and Markdown added as well.

So the API offers different formatting options, which are super useful. And I just made all the fields in the blog page editable, but one other thing you can do if you want to extend, uh, you know, you can add editable fields. in um your promote tab as well and do your meta descriptions and things like that. It's totally up to you and how you want to want to manage things. But this gives you an option to like, you know, perhaps draft in another program, or if you want to move content around uh from different parts of different websites or from different areas like this API gives you a lot of powerful options for managing and updating and moving around your content. I

see a lot of great potential. uh for this in the future and I think it's just really cool to have this. I thoroughly encourage you uh to take a closer look at uh the documentation on the API and get inspired by it. Alright, let's take a look at the release notes that we have. Here, um, so there are some other things. Like that's the you know what I just showed you with the Ride API is probably the shiniest object that I got to show you One thing I want to make clear uh because it's in the release notes is this API is a preview API. So we're actually looking for some feedback. about whether we hit the mark right with this or whether things need to be adjusted. So, you know, I wouldn't build a ton of things off it straight away just because there might be some breaking changes in the future to this version of the A

API based on that feedback. But please like come and tell us what you think about it and uh let us know what you do with it. The more we know about your use cases. the better that we can help you out and provide support. So some other things that I want to make sure that you know about in this release is we added custom base page models to this release. And for anybody who's been coding in Wagtail for a while, you know that one of the best practices that you can have is to create what is called a base page model. Since it's a very common practice, we just what decided to go ahead and officially support it And now you can uh swap out the base page model using official support and settings. And uh if you're doing any new projects, I highly recommend you check this out and you use it

because it would be a great time saver for you in the future uh to be able to kind of customize what you're going to need on every single page of your Wagtail project. Alright, what one of the other big things that we added to this release is a permission policy registry. So um looking forward to this idea of an automated future where you might have more machines interacting with Wagtail. uh than before. Permissions is definitely something that we wanted to make easier to manage and something that you can access more easily. And so this is this registry basically gives you the ability to access permission policies from anywhere in the code instead of like putting it into certain parts of the response and request cycle.

You can create background tasks and other things more easily with these permissions. And so it just gives you a lot more options for dictating what access is allowed to your content and where throughout your project. So that was created by Stage and that's gonna be very useful. One other thing that's super exciting is we now have support for Django 6. 1. Django people rejoice. We also uh put in a bunch of new security fixes into this release. Thank you to everybody who reported those And I want to make sure that we don't lose some things down in this little other features section because there's some really good stuff in here. And so we made a bunch of accessibility improvements again in this release. And uh mostly around like making it easier for people who use screen readers to know what uh

the blank values are for different blocks. And so that'll hopefully make things less confusing. And uh one other thing that I wanted to highlight here because I think it's just super cool and great. uh news for anybody who's uh trying to make their website greener is now Wagtail is officially stopping conversion of Avif and WebP images to PNG. Well, I hope those demos gave you some inspiration for what you do with Wagtail 8. 0 and get you excited about doing an upgrade. Uh but one thing that I want to tell you about before we run away here is a reminder that our call for proposals is happening right now for Wagtail Space. If you've done anything cool with Wagtail, whether you're a developer, whether you're a content editor, uh, whether you're a business leader

who's uh you know solved some pretty cool problems using Wagtail, we want to hear about it and we want you to come talk about it at Wagtail Space. Please consider submitting a talk. I'll put a link down in the video description. Go forth, play with Wagtail 8. 0, come tell us what you love about it, and I hope you enjoy it.