The State of Wagtail: 2019

This video features Tom Dyson at Wagtail Space US 2019 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, USA.

The State of Wagtail: 2019
0:32:10
Published August 23, 2019
682 views

Summary

Tom Dyson reviews Wagtail’s growth over the previous year, including its rising adoption, expanding core team and community, improved support, Draftail, accessibility work, and contributions from projects such as CodeRed CMS. He also identifies unresolved challenges: frontend and admin UI architecture, diversity, deployment, and adapting to how journalists and editors create content, illustrated by prototypes importing from Google Docs and live updates from Slack. He argues that the next stage should focus on accessibility, headless CMS support, a stronger authoring interface, more community events, and deciding whether a major modernisation is needed for Wagtail 3.0.

Key takeaways

  • Wagtail has benefited from Python’s growth and now has high-profile users including Google, the NHS, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Mozilla, and government agencies.
  • The project improved its release process, rich-text editing with Draftail, accessibility work, community support, documentation, and participation from contributors outside Torchbox.
  • CodeRed CMS and other third-party packages show that Wagtail can support opinionated distributions while preserving its flexible separation between content and presentation.
  • Prototype integrations with Google Docs and Slack explore workflows in which journalists create and revise content outside the CMS before publishing it through Wagtail.
  • Dyson sees frontend tooling, deployment guidance, diversity, and the admin UI as continuing weaknesses, and raises the possibility of a backwards-incompatible Wagtail 3.0 built around modern JavaScript and APIs.
  • The coming year should bring a stronger accessibility effort, better headless support, a best-in-class authoring experience, and more community events.

Summarised automatically from the transcript.

Chapters

  1. 0:00 Introduction and Roadmap Tom Dyson outlines the talk’s review of Wagtail’s progress, challenges, and priorities for the coming year.
  2. 1:04 Wagtail’s Growth and Adoption The talk covers Python’s rising popularity, Wagtail’s position among Python CMSs, and major users including Apple, Google, the NHS, NASA, Mozilla, and government agencies.
  3. 6:25 Release Features and Authoring Tools This chapter reviews recent development work, including version support, the Draftail rich-text editor, the starter page, and accessibility improvements.
  4. 9:33 Community and Core Team Tom discusses in-person events, the expanding core team, community support channels, and the growth of contributor involvement.
  5. 11:55 Packages and the Wagtail Ecosystem The talk highlights third-party packages such as Wagtail-Whoosh, Wagtail Review, and CodeRed CMS, along with the wider ecosystem of contributors and learning resources.
  6. 15:45 Lessons from the NPR Pitch Tom reflects on Wagtail losing the NPR project and the useful product ideas that emerged from working on the pitch.
  7. 17:15 Content Workflows and Integrations Demonstrations show importing articles from Google Docs and publishing live updates from Slack, illustrating how Wagtail can adapt to real-world editorial workflows.
  8. 23:22 Frontend Tooling and Wagtail 3.0 Tom examines the limitations of Wagtail’s existing admin frontend and considers whether a modern API-driven interface and major version reset are needed.
  9. 25:41 Diversity and Deployment This section addresses community diversity and the difficulty of deploying Python and Django sites compared with simpler web hosting models.
  10. 27:59 Priorities for the Coming Year Tom previews upcoming events and continued investment in accessibility, headless CMS use cases, and Wagtail’s authoring interface.
  11. 29:31 Headless Wagtail and UI Improvements The closing section focuses on the growing headless model and the goal of making Wagtail’s user interface and authoring experience best in class.

Transcript

6,608 words · auto-generated Show

Automatically transcribed, so expect mistakes in names and technical terms.

0:00

Speaker 1: So I want to talk about um I'm just gonna give uh just an overview of both where we're at with Wagtail and um how the last year has been and how the next year might be. And I for those of you who were here last year I did I did something similar. So uh you uh someone asked me last night uh if I kind of made any promises about where we were gonna be and uh uh And whether or not uh I I was gonna have to kind of confess that we hadn't achieved any of you is that somebody watching the screen

0:33

Speaker 2: Apparently we're having audio issues on the screen.

0:42

Speaker 1: Just testing now? Seems to be better. Stop in chat, some test. Uh mute guess nine. Yeah.

0:52

Speaker 2: Okay, hopefully people in the streaming world can now hear us.

0:59

Speaker 1: Okay.

1:00

Speaker 2: Alright, let's give that a try. Sorry about that.

1:04

Speaker 1: Thanks, Tim. So I'm gonna I'm gonna break this up into three sections What's going well, what's not going so well, and then what's coming next. And I want to start with the positive stuff. And there's a lot more positive stuff than uh than negative stuff. And uh one of the first things is that um can everyone see the screens okay? Um we don't need it we don't need the third screen too. Um One of the things that's uh been really lucky for us as uh as Wagtail as uh in the Wagtail community is that uh we picked Python for um and and Django when we when we first created Wagtail in 2014 and um and Python was uh you know was

1:49

Speaker 1: still the amazing language as it is today but uh Uh I haven't done a very good job with showing the axes here, but uh it it was, you know, it wasn't it wasn't uh it wasn't like one of kind of primary development languages. In the last two two or three years, Python's really taken off. So you might be aware that Python is now the fastest growing language. And that's not actually not driven so much because of web development, it's because of uh data science and machine learning, two of the kind of most interesting, exciting parts of computer science. Where uh Python has become almost the lingua franca. And that's great for us because we're kind of, you know, we're we're riding this wave of uh of Python popularity. And uh at the same time, you know, in the in the in the Django community, we don't like to talk about winners and losers. We're all kind of you know inclusive and uh and friendly.

2:35

Speaker 1: But um there you know there were some other Django based CMSs, but there still are some some great Django CMSs, but uh Wagtail sometime in the last year overtook the others, uh particularly have used the uh this you know the somewhat flawed Git stop GitHub star metric. And so we're now the most popular Python CMS in the world's most popular language, which feels like a you know good place to be. And we have some we have some really big name users. I probably mentioned some of these last time and there are some new ones. I was at um I was at uh Django Con US in San Diego last year and someone stopped me in the corridor and said uh thank you for Django. I always feel a bit embarrassed when people say that because this is You know, it's really

3:20

Speaker 1: this it's very little to do with me, but uh anyway, of course I accepted his his thanks. And uh and he was from Apple and uh they are, you know, this is they're they they he he showed me and this is not a kind of big public facing site that they're allowed to talk about, but he showed me how they're using Wagtail. And you know, this it's just amazing to be stopped in a corridor by someone from Apple. And then, you know, we I probably spoke last time about Google who who use Wagtail quite widely now on on their big public facing websites like google. blog and cloud dot google. And the NHS National Health Service, it's been a really big deal for us, based in the UK. This is the world's fifth biggest employer. At Torchbox we focus on nonprofit clients, so people making the world a better place. And um that's generally quite a risk-averse sector.

4:07

Speaker 1: And for us When the NHS very publicly moved their main website, NHS. uk to Wagtail , which was described as the biggest public sector migration in the UK. That was a big kind of shift for us in in the way that Wagtail was perceived, particularly in our sector I also used to talk about NASA. They were kind of early adopters with with some of their sites, but actually they've uh they've they've they're doing more and more and um uh I was lucky enough to be at um uh the Jet Propulsion Laboratory last year who are adopting Wagtail for their main website. And these are just incredible names. It's incredible to be able to talk about people like this. Mozilla , I want there's kind of a few people I want to want to draw out, particularly Mozilla, and we have uh Alan here from

4:52

Speaker 1: Mozilla Foundation, who if you want to meet him will say nice things about Wagtail in in the break. Um and uh they are I mean uh the Uh I guess unlike unlike some of the others, Mozilla are using Wagtail, but they're also doing it in a you know in a kind of typically Mozilla way where everything is open source and they are really interested and willing in contributing to the project in um which Which is which is fantastic. We're we're actually working with Mozilla at the moment on a on a new donations project. So this is gonna be for donate. mozilla. org which you know takes in that's that's like where most of Mozilla's coming funding comes from and we're building on Wagtail but and it's going to end up being a really a really nice fast focused platform for taking donations that's going to be used by Mozilla

5:38

Speaker 1: but Mozilla are you know donating donate. Mozilla. org as well. So for any other organization that's taking Mozilla that's taking donations they're going to be able to use this package. And that's you know just like the dream of open source that you get paid to build something for someone and then make it available for the whole community to use. And then lastly there are lots of governments around the world using Wagtail, but They're the the UK and the US ones I want to bring out in particular, not you know partly because of their because I'm obviously from the UK and you're mainly from the US, but uh The US government is it's the US government agencies and particular Consumer Finance Protection Bureau who are represented here today, I think, by nine people. Is that right? So uh yeah. And um uh and they are also running a really impressive open source project.

6:25

Speaker 1: So if you want to know how to build a big Wagtail site with uh with a lot of data and um and a kind of and you want to see a big project project evolve, then you should just just star them on GitHub because uh their project happens in a very expert and public way. And uh but the really big thing for us is that they've also been supporting Wagtail through the skills of their staff and uh we have two members of CFPB on on the Wagtail core team And so in the last year we've also we've also had some big features and um it's sometimes hard to pick out the big features because every time we do a release then you know there's loads of stuff. comes in from community and obviously some features mean more to uh to to some people than others but we I think we've done a really good job of keeping on top of uh release versions so we we're always like in sync with the Django versions

7:13

Speaker 1: And similarly with Python, we were you know very very quick with Python 3. 7 support. DraftTale was one of the big improvements in the last year in Wagtail, so this is the rich text editor. Before we were using something called hello. js. We kind of want to constantly focus on making the best possible authoring experience. And it turns out that quite a lot of that is is about uh handling rich text and you know things that you might not think about when you're first designing a content management system about the experience of copying content from a Word document and pasting it in and thinking about what m what information you want to keep and what you and and how that should be discarded and lots of little subtle edge cases around that. And um In the end, it turned out that HaloJS was a good place for us to start, but there were some flaws that

7:58

Speaker 1: are shared by lots of the kind of rich text editors that you get in content management systems. And so we have introduced a new rich text editor. It's called DraftTale. That development was led almost completely and delivered almost completely by my colleague Thibault, who's here and is going to be talking to us later. It's a really amazing achievement and it's also available, you know, it's as a package to use outside Wagtail in uh in other in other uh platforms. Salior is a e-commerce engine some of you may be familiar with. Pretty cool e-commerce product, open source. Uh and they're also using DraftTale, which is been good for us to see. The starter page, this is something that was started actually last uh last Jang, last Wagtail Space. uh here in Philadelphia last year. Uh Tim led led on this and there were a group of people here who who did this. And some of you may know that in Django itself that uh Django has a new starter

8:48

Speaker 1: page. Um about maybe eighteen months, two years ago and so we we kind of uh r replicated that with Wagtail. And um and it was it's kinda nice story behind that because it I mean it's it it just it's uh it makes a much a more interesting experience when you start using Wagtail. You can just get this This kind of glossy page and just you have a little bit more of a buzz of excitement when after you've after you've done the kind of five steps to get Wagtail started. But uh it had uh it was also nice the way that kind of this this particular project worked that it started in a sprint after Wagtail space here in Philadelphia and then it continued in our next event in Minsk in Belarus. and maybe got finished off in Arnhem in the Netherlands and uh it's just quite cool watching how these these these projects take off. There's been a lot of focus on accessibility as well.

9:33

Speaker 1: There's going to be some talks about this later. Thibaut's going to talk about this. Zarina's going to talk about accessibility. I'm going to talk about a bit more, so I'm going to stop there. But that's that's that's been I think a really important focus of Wagtail's development in the last year. We have uh I think you know one of the really nice things about Wagto has been that uh uh as well as the the the online communities, we've made a focus we've m of of meeting up in person, things like this. and um and you know it's it's wonderful how much you can do on Slack and GitHub and all these other tools that we have available but I think uh encouraging people to to to meet in real life Just want, you know, even once a year makes a big difference to to to how how the community feels about itself. And um I think so we're we're really happy with the events that we've been having. The core team's been growing as well, so uh

10:21

Speaker 1: it was um it was a kind of important thing for me coordinating the project at Torchbox that um we we were not uh the the core the the rep the proportion of the core team from people from torchbox should be in a minority. And that happened sort of three or four years ago. And now there's 19 people in the core team of which five are from Torchbox. books and uh um yeah I'm I'm really happy with it with the growing team and uh it's kind of we we have weekly meetings. They used to be in the kind of middle of the day in the UK time every Wednesday but now because we have people across lots of time zones we have to have one in the morning. one in the afternoon and you know even so that means that our kind of friends from Australia have to wake up at some crazy hour but um we're very grateful to them. And the community support support's been doing really well. Hopefully some of you who are already involved in Wagtail have

11:07

Speaker 1: experienced this We had a few channels before, we had um kind of email support and Google groups, but we've we've kind of made the uh we've made an effort to consolidate these on on Slack and Stack Overflow. And the Slack channel's really growing and it's really supportive and there are a lot of people now who and it's really nice seeing people who who start by asking questions and then a couple of months later they're they're answering questions. And that's lovely to see. But obviously Slack is, you know, is wonderful for those uh that kind of immediate real-time support, but it's not great for uh for finding the problems that that people have solved in the past and uh so we're always encouraging people to use Stack Overflow and uh I want to keep doing that because it just means that uh you know you know whenever it just whenever we can create an answer to a commonly used question this is going to make things simpler for people.

11:55

Speaker 1: In the long run. But I'm really happy with how community support has developed and improved over the last year. And part of that has been contributions as well. So there are loads now of fantastic packages for Wagtail that are actively developed and maintained. They have great documentation and tests. I won't go through all of these now, but I will just mention Whiteel Woosh people know or Whooshes. It's like uh if you if you don't want to install If you want really good search but you don't want to install Elasticsearch, then Woosh is uh is a Django package or a Python package that um that gives it 's a bit like kind of SQLite, but for for search engine. And uh this this is a new search backend for uh for Wagtail. Um Wagtail Review is another really interesting one. This one came out of a project that was commissioned by the National Health Service.

12:41

Speaker 1: I'm gonna demo something slightly about this later. Another really big thing that's happened this year is code red CMS. Anyone who's who's familiar here with uh with code red? apart from the two of the creators who are here. Code Red is uh is a really interesting project and it was something I felt like kind of a little bit nervous about it when I when I when I first came across it and it's uh I guess you could describe it as a sort of distribution of Wagtail. So it's uh it's a new it's another open source project um but it's uh it's uh it's like a CMS that sits runs on top of Wagtail And it's I think the use case, and I you know, uh uh Vince, you m you you must kind of correct me if I haven't got this right, but I think that the use case is really for uh for people who who want to who who might have otherwise have used uh

13:27

Speaker 1: WordPress and who want to be able to create marketing sites quickly um but uh but uh they want to kind of take advantage of all the things that the Wagtail adds as well. So Wagtail, you know, has a philosophy of make a really clean separation between content and presentation and um and being completely unopinionated about the front end and and how your user experience. should should be. But that does mean that you need a developer to make those decisions for you. And Code Red just m has a lot of very sensible defaults, which means that you can start a Code Red site and have uh you know an effective And then if you want, you can kind of, I don't know if this is the right word, but you could sort of eject from code red and just treat it as a normal wagtail project later. And the Code Red team have done a really great job of building this and

14:12

Speaker 1: iterating quickly and building a community around it. And they're also contributing back upwards into Wagtail. That's been a really positive thing for us. Also, third-party content has improved. So um This time, you know, a a year ago I'd say most of the content about Torchbox, blog posts and so on were pro about Wagtail were probably coming from Torchbox. And uh I was really keen that that wasn't and and that's clearly not the case anymore. So uh there 's a lot more about Wagtail that comes from outside TorchBox and that comes from within it. And um you know, people who someone who posts who started a Reddit channel, people who are posting blogs. This guy Michael Yin's done a really nice he's done an ebook and uh he has a really nice tutorial site But the biggest one for me has been this site,

14:58

Speaker 1: learnwagtail. com, which I hope some of you have seen. And if not, then you should definitely put mark it. LearnWagtail. com is uh is uh it's a set of videos very very professionally produced and uh and it they will they start from like uh just beginning with wagtail to some really advanced features like uh how to build headless sites there's a whole set of Uh but there's 5G drawings on headless sites, so there's 40 now and it's I think it's been watched by tens of thousands of hours worth of watching. Is that right, Caleb? And I'm very happy that Kalog is here today and is going to be talking a bit about contributing to Wagtel. And um Caleb is joined the Kalog who's who's responsible for for Learn Wagtel. As I said join core team and uh we're really, really grateful for the work designed.

15:45

Speaker 1: It's an amazing resource Okay, that's all the good stuff. That's probably not all the good stuff, but that's some of the good stuff that I'm going to talk about. Um what about some some other things? So some of you will know that uh Torchbox we had uh we had a really big um pitch for uh for NPR. So Mpr, you know, really is this amazing, prestigious organization, and uh they wanted new CMS for MPR. org and all the all the radio stations and uh this is a an amazing opportunity for us and for Wagtail. And we got down, we worked uh shortlisted to final two and it was a huge amount of work. And in the end they didn't they didn't choose Wagtail. And you know that's just like the commercial realities of of running an agency and pitching for work that you sometimes you know you invest in pitches and and you don't always get them and I understand the reasons that they that they make

16:30

Speaker 1: for finally making from their decision. But it was um it was painful because because it would have been such a boost I think particularly here in the US uh to be able to talk about NPR but also because I think you know if if they made another decision then there'd be like tens of people here from NPR today and there would have been been a big push in um you know wagtail in the in the news and media sector which i think is a particularly interesting place for wagtail to be um so so That was a shame. But um actually some good things came out of this because we had to work really hard for this for this NPR pitch and we had to think hard about uh the problems that um news and media organizations are trying to deal with and uh we at Torchbox we've built some features for Wagtail and kind of proof of concept stage that would that would help deal with this.

17:15

Speaker 1: And um I'm gonna Risk the live demo and see if I can show you one of these now. So uh let me zoom in a little bit Everyone see see the screen okay? So this is uh this is um a proof of concept site that we built for MPR for this this pitch and uh It's a multi-site, so we can run different stations under it. Here's a new section, and then within the new section I now want to add a new page. One thing that we I think we've been aware of for a while, but uh just kind of came to mind and and was brought into focus by doing this project is that um while we are trying to make the best authoring experience we can with RightTale, and I talked about how we use DraftTale

18:02

Speaker 1: and uh uh that uh it's uh as much as we would like Wagtail to be like the the pa the place where people originate content, we know that editors and writers and journalists use other systems. I wonder there's somebody else we who needs a muting to your speakers. Thank you. And uh and the reality is so that people people start their content in other places. And we want to think about um I guess w when we're when we're thinking about white house design, we want to think about Not just about uh you know uh bringing everything into Wagtail, but just thinking about the real world usage. And uh and one of the ways that people write and in fact that we that we write a torchbox

18:47

Speaker 1: is uh we might start content in Google Docs or Dropbox Paper or something like that. And then I'll share it with somebody and they'll comment on it and then when we're happy then we'll copy and paste it into our site. So we wanted to kind of think about how we would solve how we would solve that problem. So here I could add a news page as normally, but instead now I'm gonna click, let me just zoom in one more, news page from Google Document. And uh I think so normally I get an OAuth pop-up uh from Google from Google, but uh I've already done that now so uh so I'm I'm logged in. I have access to I don't know tens of thousands of Google documents on in our corporate Google account and now I can search them. So I look for NASA. Amazingly the uh the it's pretty quick the API for Google Docs. It actually feels quicker than using drive. google. com for some reason.

19:33

Speaker 1: So here's a couple of pieces about uh about NASA and uh If I click on one, it will open in Google Docs. This is a story from NPR about how NASA will pay you to lie in bed. uh to see how your body adapts to weightlessness. But you can imagine that I'm I'm I'm writing this piece now as as a journalist. And I think, well maybe we should have uh uh another header here Um I thought I'll copy that and maybe I'll make that a massive header That's appropriate. And then you know I might s I might share this with my colleague and they'll suggest some changes and I'll make them. Um so then I'm I'm I'm ready with in Wagtail and uh

20:19

Speaker 1: and I'm gonna import it. So now it's going to the Google API, it's looking at the content, it's extracting a title, there's no kind of published data available in the API. I'm going to pick an author I can take that first line from the summary. So you can see now that it's extracted. Actually that's probably the best one here. It's extracted the content from the document It just noticed there was an inline image. So it's created an image in Wagtail and referenced that here as a stream field block. You might notice this stream field UI is a bit different. So this is using the React Streamfield third-party package. It's found my

21:04

Speaker 1: hello wagtail space block and so I can preview that now and it's going to render it in the in the template at the front. It's our image and there's our header and so on. And uh this is a proof of concept, but it it's working pretty well and uh I haven't found Yeah, too many edge cases where it doesn't work. And uh feels like this is um this is a really interesting way of thinking about about uh how we adapt to to real world usage. And um I think it's something that's gonna be immediately useful Definitely to us at Torchbox and and to many of our clients. And I'm what I'm what I 'm keen to do is the next step step is to uh to make this more pluggable at the back end so that you can have different sources that could be Dropbox paper or maybe markdown files in a GitHub repository. or uh Office 365 if you've used that.

21:51

Speaker 1: I think just generally this this these ideas about how we get content in are interesting. And here's another here's another example. Resurrects again. This this next one was not from um uh not from the this is actually came from the the Waghouse based in Arnhem in the Netherlands. And this is built around the idea of um you know how uh news sites will often have stories that have been authored Um uh ahead of time, but also you might have breaking news. So this is off quite often in common sports, but also like You know, we've got a new Prime Minister in the UK and uh you know there was sort of on the day he was presenting there's like this this kind of rolling coverage in the BBC.

22:36

Speaker 1: So this is a you know a a thought about how to manage so so Kern Kern 's just created a uh a new channel in Slack and immediately that Slack that is available that's a new section in Wagtail and now he's gonna write a message. So you imagine you're in a field, you're a journalist, you're uh talking about Boris Johnson's haircut And uh you type your title title and immediately it's creating Streamfield blocks and publishing them to your page. So you can then go back and edit this in in Wagtail. Cool thing that this is all happening quite quickly that you might have missed is that you can also edit. So you know how in Slack you can kind of up arrow and change and uh that also sends sends a webhook the edit action. So that we 're going back and fixing that And you can upload images and embeds and so on. So he's put his cat

23:22

Speaker 1: image and it appears and so So uh I'm yeah, that's really cool. And that's definitely very proof of concept at the moment. But I I just I like this idea about thinking about how editors and journalists and authors are working and trying to trying to adapt Wagtail around that Anyway, I feel like I'm slightly, you know, I'm supposed to be talking about the bad things. So uh uh another thing that I feel is like is holding us up a bit is the front-end tooling. And this is not my area of expertise, but I know that If you if I look back on the issues on Wagtail, people are saying asking for uh for for different ways that um that we could present the admin interface. And uh actually uh two people from from City of Austin here today are going to be talking a little bit about this. Um and uh and and

24:07

Speaker 1: often the answer to that is just that uh it's hard to do that in Whiteel. You know, Whitel is uh It's built five years ago and the set of technologies that we used to build it then, things like you know, traditional Django templates and jQuery and uh probably not the set of technologies that we would use if we were going to start right now And that means that there's a lot of work to do in this and and you can either try to kind of iteratively clean that up and refactor the CSS. We've made some good headway in that uh Naomi here is Done a great job of helping with uh refactoring the CSS. But there's but there's a lot to do on uh on the on building the UI. And we want the UI to be like best in class. So we're I feel like we're at a bit of a crossroads that about do we kind of keep iterating on this and and improving it um

24:55

Speaker 1: or do we need to have a kind of clean clean start? Do we need a like a White Tell 3. 0 that is a modern JavaScript application? an API, which would be a really big piece of work and and would have some, you know, would mean that we would break backwards compatibility in a way that we haven't had to before. It would mean a much harder jump, I think, between three two and three than than we ever had in the past. But perhaps is necessary if we want to lay the foundations for a good dimensional system that's going to be relevant in the next five and ten years. I'd be really interested to talk to you all about that and uh while we're here and see what your opinions are. Um this is a very different point. There's diversity about the community, you know, in in in common with with tech communities everywhere. the majority of people who are kind of involved in White

25:41

Speaker 1: Tail are male, whites, Western, able -bodied. I must say, you know, here today then I think we if I if we if we had measured this Last year to this year, I think we're everything is going in the right direction. And the Django community is is is doing well in this front. But I'm also keen that that that Wagtail is, you know, does it is is a represents the kind of the the the diverse communities of people who are in who you know should be involved in technology Deployment, you know, this is a kind of classic Django thing really, but um and this is an interesting point we were talking about last night at uh uh at uh supper for the organizers at Tim 's that um uh Many of the questions we get on Wagtail Slack and Stack Overflow are about how do I deploy my site.

26:27

Speaker 1: And the easy answer to give to this is uh that's not really a Wagtail question, just you know, read the Django documentation But um it's quite tempting to do that, but actually I think what we've realized is that uh it's good that people are asking us this because it means they're coming, they're using Wagtail not just because they're Django developers and they wanted a CMS, but because They they're interested in Wagtail. They like Wagtail for the features that it has. And it means that I guess it's our responsibility to help them get to deployment. launch and uh and there's still I think it's it's still one of the tricky areas of of being a Python or a you know Python doing Python on the web that uh deployment just still isn't as easy as having a folder full of PHP files and pushing them somewhere and having it just run. And this definitely good work happening in in this area. It's a Divio

27:13

Speaker 1: who are represented here by but Joel was Joel um have you know really good so they've been they've done a great job of uh uh supporting Wagtail and you can talk to to Joel if if you're interested in in DVO services. And you know I think increasingly they're kind of um um container managed services so where you just have doc file and you push it somewhere getting simpler but I would really like to have a better answer on this. And I'm not sure how much that's a responsibility of Wagtail and Wagtail community, but I feel like whether or not it's our responsibility, it's still an impediment to Wagtail being the next WordPress. So what's next? What's coming up in the next year? There's gonna be more events. So uh this one, uh we're gonna have another one in the UK, probably in our Bristol office, uh to which you're all very welcome.

27:59

Speaker 1: Bristol is a lovely city. Uh There's one there's gonna be one in Cape Town, uh which is possibly even lovelier than Bristol and uh uh and uh definitely has more mountains and oceans. Um and uh that's that's gonna be December January, I think. And again, you're all very welcome to that. There's going to be continued focus on accessibility and um This is, I think it's a so it's it's wonderful to be able to have this enthusiasm and energy for what's such an important part of the project. And uh although you know it may not be something that many people in this room will benefit from directly. Um that it's it's uh I think it's you know it's it's really really key really

28:45

Speaker 1: critical for us that we do this right and I think uh we I may have felt two years ago that we were we were quite I'm we were we were pretty good at this but it's become very clear to me that we actually haven't been very good at this and You know, there are a lot of people who are worse than this than us, but uh you know we don't want to be just like the least worse people. We want to be we want to be doing we want to be the really good people. And um So that's kind of the theme of this, particularly I think of tomorrow and sprint on Saturday that we want to, I mean it's not a requirement to work on accessibility folks stuff, but we're really encouraging people to And there's I know there's a lot of people here who are key to do that. So a continued push. One of the things that's been really good for us is uh that uh the UK government, so we've been working on a project there for uh Department of International Trade. They are uh

29:31

Speaker 1: Perhaps I think someone said that they're the only uh the only part of the UK government that's currently growing as we panic about the impending doom of uh Brexit and the disappearance of our local markets. But they've been they've they're using Wagtail and they have uh you know there is there's requirements of government departments to to provide accessible tools. So they have funded a lot of this that development in the last few months Which has been wonderful and we we can thank them publicly for that. The headless model continues to grow. Who here is uses Wagel in a headless way or is interested in doing that? A few people here. And uh you know, we're noticing in our own among our own clients that this this is just becoming more and more popular model. So this is the idea if you're not familiar with it, that uh that the content management system takes care of the the the authoring and the workflow process, but some other bit of technology is is responsible for delivering it.

30:24

Speaker 1: And that could be like a React application or Vue or it could be a mobile phone or uh even another set of Django templates. And that we're no we we're seeing this as a as a more and more common model. And it you know, uh while it can add cost and expense and complexity in some cases, it often there's some really important advantages in others too. And uh I think It's really it's gonna be critical for Wagtail to have a good story around headlessness to stay relevant. And actually it's done well. I mean we had a great talk here last year from someone at rice. edu about their headless site and there's some really big successful headless sites out there but also there's some points where Wakehoff hasn't been hasn't worked quite so well. I was going to show you a demo about how we're doing this better already, but I'm about to run out of time.

31:09

Speaker 1: If anyone's interested in headless stuff, come and see me and I'll I'll show you some examples of this. I think that's going to be a push for the rest of this year too And then an increased UI focus. So uh whether or not wait we make this kind of the big decision about the you know the the move to a more drastic change in three point zero, we uh particularly at Torchbox are gonna invest in in making the UI for Wagtail best in class. And I think that one of the reasons that Wagtail was popular in the first two or three months was because it it looked good and it looked better than some of the other content mentioned systems but I think we we we want to we want to kind of continue on that and not just about how it looks but uh just thinking about that authoring experience all the time how preview works about the responsiveness I have had to rush through that last bit

31:54

Speaker 1: because uh I probably went on too long at the start. Um I'm out of time now and I think we should move on to the next session. But thank you all very much and please please come and talk to me if you have any questions about this. I'm looking forward to the next few days. I'm putting the shapes.

Questions this talk answers

What is Draftail, and why did Wagtail introduce it?

Draftail is Wagtail’s new rich-text editor, replacing Hallo.js. It was introduced to improve authoring, especially handling pasted content and the edge cases involved in copying from tools such as Word.

Discussed at 7:13

How has the Wagtail community and support system grown?

The core team had grown to 19 members, only five of them from Torchbox, with regular meetings across time zones. Community support was increasingly consolidated around Slack and Stack Overflow, with former question-askers becoming contributors and answerers.

Discussed at 10:21

What is CodeRed CMS, and who is it for?

CodeRed CMS is an open-source distribution of Wagtail aimed largely at people who might otherwise choose WordPress and want to create marketing sites quickly. It provides sensible defaults while retaining the option to move toward a standard Wagtail project later.

Discussed at 12:41

How can Wagtail import content from Google Docs?

The demonstrated proof of concept lets editors search their Google Docs, select a document, and import its title, text, author information, summary, images, and formatting into Wagtail. Tom says the same approach could later support sources such as Dropbox Paper, GitHub Markdown files, and Office 365.

Discussed at 18:47

What are Wagtail’s main front-end and deployment challenges?

The admin interface is built on older technologies such as Django templates and jQuery, making customization and modernization difficult; the project was considering incremental refactoring versus a more substantial Wagtail 3.0 rewrite. Deployment is also still harder than deploying a simple PHP site, and Tom identifies that as an impediment to Wagtail becoming the next WordPress.

Discussed at 24:07

What is a headless Wagtail site?

In a headless setup, Wagtail handles content authoring and workflow while another technology—such as React, Vue, a mobile app, or another Django frontend—delivers the content. Tom says this model is becoming more common and that Wagtail needs a stronger headless story to remain relevant.

Discussed at 30:24

What is Wagtail planning to focus on in the coming year?

The planned priorities include more community events, continued accessibility work, stronger support for headless sites, and a greater focus on making the user interface and authoring experience best in class.

Discussed at 31:17

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