The Wagtail Ecosystem - Vince Salvino

Speaker 1: Okay, there we go. That's a little bit better. All right. Thanks everyone for bearing with me. So today we're going to talk about the Wagtail ecosystem. And this is something I'm particularly kind of passionate about. and uh very involved with with the stuff that we do at Code Red. So we'll just dive right in. Maybe. There we go. Okay. Just a quick warning. So this is, you know, we're all developers. We all love Wagtail, right? I love Wagtail. We use it very heavily. But this talk is going to be from the business perspective. So someone who's never worked with Wagtail, someone who does not use Wagtail, like develop Wagtail, the editor perspective.

Speaker 1: So, you know, you can expect uh just a tiny bit of cynicism maybe as we take an outsider's look, uh as you know I love to do. So uh let's just you know take a step back and say, why is something popular? Right? Like um Thibaut touched on this on his talk, his opening keynote about, you know, how how can we make Wagtail more popular and that kind of thing. And this is, you know, countless books have been written on this topic. Is something popular because it's good? It could be because of its brand, who it's associated with. Or maybe it's good because it's backed by a lot of money. And while all those things are somewhat true, they're not really the reason that something becomes popular.

Speaker 1: And you're gonna hate this answer, but the reason something is popular is because people say it's popular, right? There's a certain uh crowd mentality that goes into these things. So, you know, how did something become popular? Well, people will start talking about things and they will start sharing things that make them look smart, that elevating their own status, right? So if you're a developer and you help your boss accomplish their project, you are going to look smart. You know, you have elevated your status. If you are a developer and you help your friends with their side hustle, you're elevating your status, right? And if you help yourself by learning something new and you successfully complete it and you learned it and you know you feel good about that you know you've just improved your self-confidence there

Speaker 1: so um when a tool has helped elevate your status that tool will grow in popularity Right. So going back to my previous examples, you helped your boss with their project and you used Wagtail and the boss is super happy and now the company switches to start using Wagtail. So Wagtail has just spread that way. Or you you did uh you helped your friend with their side hustle and now they're hiring their first employee or their first couple employees and those employees are working on Wagtail. You know, Wagtail has just spread that way. And you know, if you've improved your own skill and you learned something new, now you are most likely going to teach someone else how to do that thing. And once again, Wagtail has just spread.

Speaker 1: So it's all about, you know, how does that tool help you? How does that tool help your standing in what you're doing? And um, you know, so so how how can this tool actually be helpful? Uh when we're talking about websites, there's a few things that like always come to mind. Once again, this is the business perspective here. You implemented your project quickly. That's always a big one, right? Everyone loves to just make up deadlines and you've got to meet those deadlines. It's always so important. The website has to look nice. It's a very vain thing, right? It could work perfectly, but if the design doesn't look up to par, then people are just not going to be happy with it.

Speaker 1: The website has to have the features that you need. Oftentimes this is something in the realm of some kind of forms, some kind of e-commerce, some kind of uh events or calendar or right these are like common things that uh people have on their websites okay and the website also has to not be siloed meaning you know maybe 10 years ago That this wouldn't have mattered, but nowadays uh webs no website exists on an island. It's connected to things, Salesforce, MailChimp , analytics, right? There's there's all these different things, this web of services that are connected together. So we're talking about how to elevate your status with these things, right? Let's change that to how does Wagtail help elevate your status?

Speaker 1: How does Wagtail help with these things, practical things? Well, yeah, implementing your project quickly. Wagtail is super developer friendly. So you're gonna be able to get rolling. The tutorials are good, the docs are good. That's great. Does Wagtail help your website look nice? No, it doesn't because Wagtail doesn't have a front end. It doesn't do that. It has no opinion on the designs or anything like that. So Wagtail, it's not going to hinder you, but it's not going to help you in this realm either. Similarly, feature-wise, right, there is a Wagtail Contrib forms, but there's a few Wagtail Contrib things, but for the most part, Wagtail's pretty bare bones. And normally that's good because you know it does one thing,

Speaker 1: does it well, but you know, Wagtail isn't going to necessarily help you build an e-commerce site. That's just not a feature that Wagtail has. And as far as being siloed, once again, from the developer perspective, yeah, it's Python, we can connect to anything, but you're going to be rolling your own. Wagtail itself does not provide integrations with these things out of the box. Okay, so Wagtail is really not going to help you with any of those three things. And once again, I want to emphasize those aren't what Wagtail is supposed to do. That's not what it does. Wagtail does one thing and does it well, and that is it's a development tool. Uh developers love it. When you compare, when you start to compare Wagtail to something like WordPress or any other CMS

Speaker 1: really. What you're currently comparing right now in 2022 is you're comparing a framework to an ecosystem. And that's not a fair comparison. Right. That would be like saying, well, what can I do with Python versus WordPress? And it's like, well, those are two really different things. You're not really going to compare them. But Wagtail being a CMS, it now has to compete in this world of ecosystems. It can't just be a tool anymore on its own, or else it's going to forever remain a tool. So that's what we're going to talk about is the ecosystem. You know, what is the ecosystem? How does that relate? You know, what would a wagtail ecosystem even look like?

Speaker 1: So let's start with a few examples. I'm going to pick on WordPress for a minute. WordPress has themes, and if you just go to the WordPress. org site, you will see all this stuff. Aggregated. WordPress has many themes that you can choose from. Those help you with the look of the site. WordPress has many plugins that you can choose from. That helps you with adding functionality, right? There's a a very widely used e-commerce framework that you literally install and you start adding products and within probably an hour you can have a basic e-commerce site set up. And WordPress has a lot of hosting options. Third-party companies, you know, there are a dime a dozen. I'm not saying all these things are good because they do have a lot of particular problems in the WordPress world, but

Speaker 1: You know, WordPress has all three of those things. You can start on one day, and on day two, you can have a hosted site with the various plugins and features that looks really nice from a theme all ready to go. WordPress helps you with those. things that elevate your status and help you complete your projects. So let's look at the plugins for a minute. They have a very uh Sort of a plugin registry, catalog, database, whatever you want to call it. There's a few things I want to highlight. These actually are things that they do somewhat well. And that is each WordPress plugin Tells you which version of WordPress it's compatible with. That's sort of a part of the central database.

Speaker 1: It also tells you what version of PHP, which version of WordPress it was last tested on, right? So you can see here that this particular one was last tested on 5. 8. 4. If you're running 5. 9, use at your own risk, right? So these are really helpful things that just from the you know non-technical standpoint you can look at something like this and say, oh yes, I this feature I can cross off my list. It's already covered here They also have ratings and things like that. So these are these are some things that just help the non-technical person validate and say, oh, there's a thousand people using this plugin. We're good to go. One problem, and this is something that WordPress does not do very well, is

Speaker 1: verifying uh good plugins, right? And that's a very subjective term. But uh if you search for an SEO plugin on WordPress, you're gonna get a thousand results. Um half of them are gonna make your site slower or just junk or unmaintained. And that's just because it's open. Anyone can make them, you know, anyone can also abandon them. So verifying good plugins is a is a struggle with any ecosystem. Twitter, I'm going to use the example of something that does this kind of well, and I'll pick on our president, Joe Biden, has the Twitter verified sticker, right? That Twitter says this, this is the real person How many other Joe Bidens are on Twitter? Probably a lot. I don't really want to look. But you know that this is the one because Twitter verified it.

Speaker 1: I do wish that website CMS systems that have plugins would have some kind of verification process just to say This is a recommended or this is a preferred or this plugin has been reviewed for quality so that you get that kind of authentication that says, okay, you know, I don't have to worry about this picking the wrong one. So the other part of an ecosystem besides all those things is partnerships. And WordPress does not really do this, but some other CMSs that are a bit bigger or more enterprisey do this. And uh uh SiteCorrent and Bracco are two that come to mind. They have very robust partner programs. And um usually this is The central like

Speaker 1: company makes the CMS and also does some implementations, but because these things are so popular, no one company is going to handle all the work for you know, making all these websites. So they'll have agencies that are sort of certified, approved. This is a good agency we can refer you to. They're following the best practices, you know, take your pick. So benefits of a partner program. A client can find a developer. And that's currently something that's a little bit difficult with Wagtail, right? Obviously, you know you can go to Torchbox, Four Digits, some of the other bigger names. You can check out the madewithwagtail. org that cites, you know, varying degrees of being updated.

Speaker 1: You know, so, but there's they're not necessarily partners, they're just anyone, you know, they might not even be doing Wagtail anymore. Clients can feel safe choosing Wagtail. So this is a big thing, right? Maybe their developer found Wagtail and says, oh, Wagtail's great, it's going to solve our problems. And then they go around looking for an agency and say, uh, we only see two or three. A quick Google search only shows us two or three agencies doing Wagtail. We might want to stay away from it because It just doesn't look like it's, you know, there if if we get burned by one agency or if we don't like that agency, we're just kind of out. No one else is going to be able to help us. And on the flip side, developers get more business. Developers make more money. Anyone who has a small agency.

Speaker 1: uh you probably have a hard time getting found. You probably rely on just personal referrals. But if you're a member of a larger partnership program , The other partners or the main CMS itself is going to be able to throw business your way and say, oh, well, maybe you're a freelancer, you're a smaller developer, and there's a smaller client, you could, but you're a good match. Maybe you're a big Fortune 500 company and there's a few partners that match you with that. So developers get more business. Everyone wins. And developers follow common standards. So this is not too much of a problem with Wagtail yet, but this is a humongous problem in WordPress because they don't have a developer program. And that is Any anyone out there could potentially do a bad job at implementing something

Speaker 1: and it's not the fault of the framework and uh you know Once again, varying degrees of, you know, some people maybe are only work in front end and they're trying to implement back end. It's not their specialty, what have you. But when you're a member of a partnership program, you do get a little bit of training, you do get a little bit of standards to follow and a baseline. And it's like Wouldn't that be nice if you had an official, in addition to the docs, you had some Wagtail training and you had some Wagtail guides to follow that were pretty much industry standard? And you can feel confident knowing that you're doing things the right way, especially if you're newer to Wagtail. So And as I mentioned, clients and developers can be matched based on industries, budgets, team size, etc.

Speaker 1: It's just a good way for people to find each other. So, okay, just given that some of those, you know, just those things exist in other CMS worlds, um, what is the current state of the Wagtail ecosystem? I'm pleased to say it's been improving and growing. Wagtail Packages is relatively new. And this is a good start, but we need a lot more. And that is a listing of Pit packages or plugins as they might be referred to, things that you can do with Wagtail. This is great for developers. If you're a business person who's You know, looking at this, you might say, uh, this isn't really what I'm looking for. It's a list of package names. It's a little bit developer-y

Speaker 1: at the moment. Um, so you know, this is one area of improvement where we can really build uh build on top of to just really showcase what people are doing with Wagtail. Similarly, uh the Wagtail. io, I think Wagtail. org now site has uh some services and some hosting providers so these are things that are also a good start um but you know a lot more is needed to really show off hosting practices, hosting options, and also other developers kind of like the made with wagtail, but improving that a bit. So what would a successful future look like knowing this? This is purely my opinion.

Speaker 1: So this is what I think Wagtail needs to do to kind of get To that really solid ecosystem. And that is a plugin repository/slash website, right? We have Wagtail packages, it's a good starting point, but building that off of PyPI adding additional details, curating some of those results, maybe based on either the number of pip installs or just what we know, you know, kind of empirically people are using. Verifying some packages. So at a minimum showing which developer built them. That way, you know, it's You as the user who's prospective user have a way of kind of vetting what's out there, maybe some kind of verification system in the future.

Speaker 1: The second thing is strategic go-to packages. So there's a handful of things out there that are just almost every website needs. uh some kind of forms, some kind of theming, um, which for the now, every developer builds their own theme. Uh some kind of e-commerce, some kind of MailChimp. And once again, there's things out there that do this. There might be PIP packages that do it. There might be You know, we've discussed other uh Django salesmen and Salior and stuff at Nazi Amp during this conference. But you know, no one still really knows where to go. It's always a just a gamble. Have you tried this? Have you tried this? And the last thing is some kind of a partnership program.

Speaker 1: This helps clients find their partners, find the developers, and it helps agencies grow and build more Wagtail because they get more clients coming their way. So all three of these things I think will massively contribute to the spread of Wagtail and will improve what people are able to do with Wagtail. you know, without having to go down really heavy development heavy projects. So there's a few challenges with this And that is, you know, Wagtail is open source, right? No one particularly owns Wagtail. Yes, we have Torchbox as our sort of benevolent uh dictator type of uh, you know, and they and they have done an amazing amount of work on it. But well Wagtail is fully open source.

Speaker 1: So who will run the plugin website? Who would potentially verify any partners or who would you know be in charge of that That's a hard that's a hard question to answer. And also balancing openness with oversight. Wagtail has a lot of contributors and that's great. And we want that. We want to continue that. We would never want to do anything that blocks people out. We also want to continue to be welcoming to new developers, contributors. Once again, we we never want to block anyone and we don't want to make it delete or anything like that. You know, so it's balancing that. you know, oversight of quality packages and quality uh you know partners versus also allowing newcomers and everyone to continue contributing how they are.

Speaker 1: So that's it. That's my slides. I know I'm a little bit early on time, but happy to take any questions. Thank you.

Speaker 2: Structure the quality checks or verified packages, but there's some checks which we wouldn't do.

Speaker 1: Okay. So I think the question was how should we structure the quality checks of packages? That's a good question. Certainly some degree of source code review should be involved with that. I can tell you I've personally reviewed certain WordPress plugins and just discovered that they're uploading your entire request log to some third party server and you're like, oh that's why it was so slow. So we certainly want some degree of source code, you know, probably half automated, half just uh someone skimming through it, it would be a lot of effort. Um, but um that's you know enforcing some standards like for example black Flake 8, you know, just basic stuff like that.

Speaker 1: And a lot of those tools are newer. They're just starting to be adopted. So, you know, having some kind of boilerplate. Um that yeah maybe a minimum 70% test coverage, unit tests, things like that really go a long way in helping something.

Speaker 3: So we have a lot of questions so we can alternate between the time. I think we can do that. Five minutes. I think we're all of them. So I'll do one from the chat and then we can move back to the one in the in the audience. What about a wiki for user contribu contributors?

Speaker 1: What about a wiki for user contributors? That's a good question. Is that right? Okay. Yeah, I think the docs are improving a lot. That's great to see. I know Django has a forum that is newer within the past few years. I think the Django forum's been getting some adoption. I don't know if we're at the point yet of a Wagtail forum. The Slack kind of is the forum. Uh and and actually there's a lot of Wagtail users I've encountered who have never gotten on the Slack. Uh so That's something to keep in mind that you know we are a little bit inside of a bubble because we're all such enthusiasts and we're daily Wagtail contributors, but someone who's exploring Wagtail or just starting with their first site,

Speaker 1: might not even be in the Slack. They might not realize the Slack even exists. So yeah, a wiki of some form would probably be a good idea. Yeah

Speaker 4: , so I'm just going to be interested in that. But you're like this if they all show All these things are seeing where we are. So You create a Google

Speaker 4: process or a verification process or funding or something. Combat that you almost have to create the So we have this bag to use that function who works through public. So I I think it's a hard problem to solve the one that figure out if you don't

Speaker 1: yes, uh the question was that um Uh being able to approve or verify packages is sort of an industry-wide problem, not just a wagtail one. And um If you do that, it will potentially slow down if there's a security update or something like that and you need to quickly push updates, that approval process could slow that down. Uh yeah, no, I agree that that it's an industry-wide problem and it's not a wagtail problem. Um Python packages, uh, you know. It's it's anyone can publish, right? Anyone can publish anything, which is good, but um if you're relying on something like requests, right? Everyone knows requests, everyone lives and dies by the request package. Um

Speaker 1: That's something you want a little bit more care on than, you know, for example, a kind of very niche boutique package. Yeah, NPM has had a lot of problems with this. I don't know the right solution, and this is maybe something where Wagtail could potentially lead the way with uh some of the most popular Wagtail packages, you know, having some sort of maybe it's a hybrid approval process where major or minor versions are go through a stricter approval and security updates. You know, the developer 's been vetted somewhat, so security updates can flow through freely. You know, I don't it's it's a very interesting problem. So

Speaker 3: So we have four minutes, so I think that's probably about like three or four or five questions. So I think we have plenty. I'll move to the chat and then we can go back to the audience. What uh would a group of wagtail maintainers like Jazz Band be a helpful thing to exist?

Speaker 1: Uh so would a group of wagtail uh maintainers like Jazz Band, would that be helpful?

Speaker 3: Would yeah, would that be a helpful thing to assist?

Speaker 1: Um I I think it would, and I think for some to some level, the Wagtail Core team kind of already is that. Um the Wagtail Core team, it's important to note that It is not just one company. There are many companies. I don't know how many people are on it, 20 or 30 people probably, right? Maybe even slightly more than that. Yeah, somewhere in that range. So we have a good spectrum of people from different backgrounds, different parts of the world. And you know, oftentimes with big releases, it does hinge down to a few people who are, you know, really critical to making sure that gets out. So I'm not super familiar with jazz band, but I I think it's somewhat of a same concept of people from different companies and different backgrounds.

Speaker 1: So yes, that that is certainly a helpful thing to have.

Speaker 3: Well you're not tired yet. You can go back to the uh

Speaker 1: Okay. Any any last questions? No, all right. Any last one? Oh yeah.

Speaker 4: Because this is

Speaker 1: Yeah, sorry, can you speak up slightly? I'm

Speaker 3: having trouble.

Speaker 1: I'm having trouble.

Speaker 4: We can download builds that are called distributions. Is there a way of officially um package technologies that you don't Just play a bit and kind of an elevated sort of core that extends the entire project balance.

Speaker 1: Yes. So

Speaker 4: it does balance the impact.

Speaker 1: Yes, no, that's a great comment. Um, that uh certain builds like Acquia or Drupal has different kind of pre-configured builds that has additional features in them. So it's sort of a verified Way of getting lots of extra features. Yes, so that's actually something that we worked on very heavily at CodeRed, and that is what we call CodeRED CMS. We're sort of in the process of rebranding that, renaming that to Wagtail CRX. for Wagtail extensions. Basically what we've done is a uh it's a a layer on top of Wagtail with a lot of extra features like lots of forms pre-built, lots of events calendar, bootstrap CSS with templates and almost like themes. We're not quite at themes yet, but sort of themes.

Speaker 1: And we've built that and we use that on a lot of our sites because it does provide some of those extra features on top of Wagtail that are needed for those use cases. So that that's certainly something we're continuing to go down. I would like to see our package almost become obsoleted by lots of other packages that provide the necessary uh things in the middle for those extra features and just you know that robustness of the wack til ecosystem. But yeah, that is one approach. That's the approach we've been following so far.