Wagtail Dashboards

Oh that 's fair? Oh my god.

Speaker 1: Okay, hello. So um my name is Judith and this is Emmeline, and we are from Fabric. And for those who don't know Fabric We make websites for clients and we use uh Wagtail for that. And today we're going to talk about uh dashboards. So why a dashboard? Well let me paint a little picture for you So imagine that you have this uh content. So we have a uh a main page and uh we have a component that is an image slider that uses different Wagtail blocks. So for example, we have multiple images that you can use in a list. Maybe even add caption, decide whether you want to show the caption or not. Quite simple, right? Well, what if this is not the only site that the customer wants?

Speaker 1: What if also they want a subsite? And uh the subsite looks very, very similar It uses a little bit of a different front end, but it's quite similar, so we we decide to use the same component, right? Uh reusability nil. But now in this case the customer actually wants to limit the images to only have two images. And for example, they don't want to show a caption on this. So we can very easily restrict this because we're developers, you know, we can do this. But um what if actually they don't only have one main site and a subsite, but we have ten Well in this case it becomes a little bit more difficult because what if you can use that component in every single subsite, in multiple templates, because we want to be able to reuse

Speaker 1: Well in this case, if we want to then change a little thing, so for example, you would want to add an introduction to this, but only on this one subsite. It should not change it in the other subsides. That simple subsite should have another little block that should not exist in this and this and this. It becomes a very, very complex picture. And this is where our dashboard comes in.

Speaker 2: So yeah, so for that purpose we created a dashboard to show uh all these components and uh specifically to show which ones are available. Where they are used and how often they are used. And so for this view, we uh it it extends the report view that's already in Wagtail, but we had to uh change it a little bit. So we wanted custom columns and we wanted to show the templates in a very specific way. And so for this particular client, it was really nice to have insights in the components. Because as the subsites grow, the components also grow. So then it can get quite tricky to keep track of what's used, where, and what's available.

Speaker 2: So here we see the image slideshow from before, and we can see that it's available on quite some content pages and exhibition pages, for example, but it's not always used. So if the the pills are grayed out then it's not it's available but it's not used. And you also see how often it's actually implemented And this gives us insights as to how important the component is, if it actually makes sense to work on it, and so for clients with many, many pages in the CMS. It's really nice to uh see this actually. Uh that was actually thank you for your time