State of Wagtail 2025

Speaker 1: I'm going to uh summon one of my co-captains up here so that his camera he can start getting his camera ready and everything. So and while he's doing that I'm just going to say that, you know, this is Wagtail Space has been a tradition that we've done over the past few years. I just want to give a special shout out to Four Digits for being one of the originators of that. And one of the traditions we have at Wagtail Space is to present the state of Wagtail talk. And over the past few years that is that talk has been given by Tom Dyson, but this year we are passing the torch to one of my colleagues and friends, Tebo Colas.

Speaker 1: And uh Tebow is not only a member of the Wagtail Core team, he is also currently president of the Django Software Foundation. He has done quite a bit for our community. And I am so, so very happy to hand over the mic to him today.

Speaker 2: Hi everyone. Thanks very much, Megan, for the lovely intro. I'm getting my screen share ready uh quite a bit for the community. I love that. I am I am trying hard and I'm honestly loving every second of it. So it's really a pleasure to be here. And um I'm wearing multiple hats today, but I'll just say very quickly, on behalf of the Django Software Foundation, we're super happy that events like this are happening and that we get to support them And um yeah, on with my talk, State of Wagtail, um Megan's mentioned some of my credentials. My talk, there's lots of links in it. Lots of opinions as well. Please do take a moment if you want to to open the slides for the talk.

Speaker 2: It's at wachtel. org slash s ow for state of wagtail And you have access to the slides just as I speak. And maybe you'll get to ask questions at the end. I'm hoping to leave some time for questions at the very end of the talk. Um before I get to my material, I just thought I should acknowledge how big of a deal it is that we have so many people here today and that we're doing this online uh for the whole uh community. Um I think we just broke the 600 registrants number, which is crazy to think about. And When we pitched this white telescope event initially, one of the internal names we had for it was uh was future of CMS.

Speaker 2: I didn't quite know what to think of that, um, but I think we really lived up to that working title. It's just so crazy to me to see such an amazing lineup of speakers. Uh yeah, I won't go through the motions. We already know who's on there. some of you here today are also speaking. Um but yeah just tremendous to see the progress. Makes me question The need for a state of white tail talk, I think just the amount of things we have going on, the quality of what we're about to witness over those two days. speaks for itself really. But I just want to acknowledge that the it's a bit bittersweet that we don't have this as an in-person event. There's lots of advantages to having it online, but definitely I'd encourage you all if you have the chance.

Speaker 2: as a follow-up to this event to join the community in person. This year we had lots of presence at Django events. This is from the DjangoCon US meetup This is the booth that uh Vince Salvino from Code Red and and Megan from Torchbox made happen for Wactail at that conference. And uh we had very world-class content on stage. This is uh Riz One from Global Logic showing how the Irish government adopts Wagtail for their main flagship websites. This is from Django Kong, Africa. We didn't really have an official wagtail presence there, but definitely had uh wagtail shirts in the audience, lots of stickers flying around. Um yeah, so It's great to see you all here, bit

Speaker 2: better sweet nonetheless, but uh I think it's gonna be fun in a couple days and one more for Jungle Con Europe And yes, so this is very much uh my uh state of wagtail. Uh I really think these days the state of the community speaks for itself. It's outstanding how uh much we are making happen and the impact we get to have. So this is more of a personal take on my opinions as to the state of things And um I tried to pick a theme for this, I called it our responsibility as tech people, generally speaking Uh this event here is very much not just for devs. Uh when I say tech people I mean everyone who helps build the web, whether that's content. design, code of course, infrastructure, decision

Speaker 2: making. We're all in some sense tech people and also obviously with my perspective, our responsibility as stewards of the of the White Help project. I use this picture often when I describe like opinion stalks where we're heading as a community. This is kind of the idea of having a North Star up in the dark skies that we look up to as our goal. Doesn't really acknowledge the challenges along the way. You know, it's good to have a shared vision, but we also I think all have to be aware of the the shared challenges, the like Kessler syndromes of the dark skies the satellite constellations, they're all out there just as much and and we need to be aware of them. Yeah, foreshadowing.

Speaker 2: Um but yeah, I think the best way to get uh state of white test talks started is with uh uh up and to the right chart. That's kind of a mandatory thing for us to do and we do have plenty of those, so it's very easy. Um I chose here to represent White Tails growth as a downloads of the White Tail package on on the Python packaging index It goes up year to year. This is nothing new here, but I thought it'd be interesting for people to be aware of the overall trend. We're looking here at a rough 30% increase of those downloads year to year. And the kind of numbers that we use to represent the success of Wagtail, they are all um following very similar trends. of up

Speaker 2: and to the right, no surprise there. We don't have a responsibility to any shareholders to make Wagtail go up and to the right. But we do want our community to feel like they're getting something out of their adoption of the CMS. that we're building this you know for open source to meet our values but also to meet the real uh needs of real users and that Bacter does find its audience. Yeah, number of sites detected. According to this data, we're on the order of 5,000 sites at the moment. I do know this is a very clear understatement, and we're more likely on the order of 15 to 20,000 sites out there currently. And yeah, we have lots of lots of data like this available, so I'll share lots of that kind of data during my talk,

Speaker 2: section by section. And the overall picture here is growth, basically, is what I I wanna wanna highlight. And I say growth in just pure numbers, but I think it's definitely worthwhile to take a moment to take stock of um what exactly we mean by wagtail adoption. So we have this lovely section on our official websites, the Wagtail Websites Showcase. Uh there's not enough sites on there if you ask me currently, but there's definitely plenty of excellent ones nonetheless. I'll just scroll through them quickly. There's some outstanding organizations out there making good view the CMS using it as a content platform but also more generally as a platform for their web presence. Yeah, the Tate

Speaker 2: Museum in the UK right now on the screen, Mozilla Foundation. um yougov uh based in the uk as well working in democracy and statistics really really outstanding work that those people do with Wagtail And yeah, beyond adoption, uh, I think it's time now to look at the uh practical impact we have with uh with Wagtail, with our community. I showcased two specific kinds of impact that are close to my heart, which are accessibility and later on sustainability, as in environmental footprint of tech. Accessibility is a really simple one one for me to pitch usually, which is that the web at large is not as accessible as it should be. There's pretty clear numbers out there on

Speaker 2: this, so 95% of home pages. having accessibility issues that's definitely getting better but at a very very slow pace and that's the kind of thing where I'd like to think BackTech has a positive impact our accessibility checkers for people spending time in in the CMS. That's been one of the recent features that has had a tremendous impact on the presence of issues on websites This is a good example to me because when we look at how people use Wagtail, we definitely know that organizations like governments that that use the CMS, they can get outstanding results out of it. And it's really important that we make room for those perfect sites But we also need to keep in mind the bigger picture of common issues across the wider Wagtail

Speaker 2: web. So I mentioned the activity checker. Here is a practical look at some of the checks that it includes. and how we can see year to year as the checker has gained in in adoption, that those errors do become less and less common, those checks that are included. um are in passing states way more often. But yeah, it's not it's not all roses. Surprise, surprise. So if we come back to this number of sites with no issues The problem we have in the in the gray line here is the number of sites with no issues does go up, but as whacked adoption grows as well, there are lots of sites nonetheless that do come with issues

Speaker 2: and our relative number of sites without issues has gone down lately. So I share this in the interest of transparency, but also to highlight the need for us to keep working at it. over time. And when I say us, I don't mean just the Wagtail core team, I mean the industry at large, just to be clear. But obviously for Wagtail we do have more of a responsibility as stewards of the project. So yeah, impact definitely there. The numbers speak for themselves, but this particular last number does speak to us having to keep working at it. And yeah, sustainability, yet another chart that goes up and to the right. I don't really know here who's familiar with that chart.

Speaker 2: It is something that I think about probably on a daily basis these days, which is uh the impact of society as a whole, uh climate change how carbon emissions are changing the world for all of us, whether we like it or not, and how we have to deviate from this up and to the right business as usual if we want a future that isn't so warm for our for our kids, simply enough. And um again as technology, people don't necessarily think of a CMS as far as climate. They might think of the airline industry, they might think of tourism and business travel. But we definitely see our digital industry having more and more of an impact on the overall picture here and us having to work to lower that impact, which is what we want to do with Wagtail.

Speaker 2: And we're in good company here. I thought I'd showcase one specific example, which is the stewardship of uh Mozilla, makers of the Firefox browser. that back in 2020 were very clear the majority of their emissions weren't like Mozilla as an organization, Mozilla Corporation or Foundation as entities. But just Firefox users out there with 98% of Mozilla 's emissions attributable to Firefox users. And I think we're basically in the same boat with Wagtail, where we have to look carefully at how people use it and potentially adjust how Wagtail works to reduce its overall footprint. I hear you asking already, but exactly how big is that footprint? And of course we tried to put a number on that.

Speaker 2: It's very important for those numbers. so we know where we're heading. Wacttail's footprints is a staggering 6,000 tons of carbon emissions per year. And that's simply a matter of there being more and more and more sites built with Wagtail. that tend to be pretty large sites. When I mentioned Wachtel 's on the order of 20,000 sites per my estimates, this figure right here is only based of about 5,000 of those sites So the real picture probably much higher, but those estimates can be quite tricky to come by, put together. So again, keep in mind this is just a ballpark, so we have a sense. of the problem we're talking about here. But when we discuss our responsibility as tech people and as stewards of Fragdale, it's really crucial to be aware of the bigger picture here.

Speaker 2: Because any change we make that makes this worse by even just 1% has quite tremendous consequences rippling across thousands of websites. I tried to make this a bit easier to visualize with a rating system. People in the UK, Europe and other regions I'm sure are very familiar with those ratings systems for energy efficiency of different systems. And uh we have the same type of concept for the web, and this is how our Wagtail scores at this point in time. So the ratings from A plus to F. The proportions here are where the wagtail sites fall, statistically speaking, and the gray bars are the industry average for those same ratings So I'm happy to report that I do think

Speaker 2: all in all we fare better than industry average, but uh there are clear uh needs for improvements here and there. So for example to the left here number of uh A plus Blacked websites that is a bit lower at 3. 4% than the industry average 5%. Those numbers are a bit arbitrary, just to be clear, like uh people who made this scale decided where the different ratings would fall. Um But to me this is a good example of the fact that Notwithstanding the Wagtail sites being very complex, notwithstanding them having lots of content, we still do need those larger sites to score better so that we arrive at reductions to our carbon emissions So that we reduce our impact on the planet.

Speaker 2: It goes in sequence like that. And yeah, the problem we arrive at here once we do have this data is decide where to spend our time. Do we look at those A plus sites, make them better? Even though Wagteil has fewer opinions about the sites design and front end, maybe we have start to have some opinions about opinions about that? Do we look at the worst sites out there and try to make those better? Um very important design choices that we have to grapple with. If you're new to this topic, just a quick shout-out. This is an excellent intro from Vince Salvino and I at PyCon US as a poster, and I'll give you some of the more fundamentals to understand these kinds of data. So yes, now we have to do something about it.

Speaker 2: We know there's a problem. We know there are multiple options. We have to reflect And we have to get building and find ways to solve this, because you know we're technologists. We want to build new things, change how we build things to get uh better outcomes. I thought I'd showcase one specific example of that, which is the Grid Aware websites projects stewarded by the Green Web Foundation, which I got the chance to take part in representing Wagtail. uh among other um CMSs in the landscape was a very interesting project that we managed to follow up with uh a separate adoption project of our own. that uh you'll hear more about. But this is exactly what I think we should be doing as technologists. Bend together, have discussions, build a better future.

Speaker 2: And yeah, back to Wagtail. The best way for us to build a better future is to agree on what we put on our roadmap. I thought I'd showcase that quickly. The current roadmap, I'm sure lots of you will have seen it already, lots of different improvements across many aspects of the project. I won't go into details. Definitely check it out if you have the chance after this call if you haven't already. and uh future roadmap that's where the sausage is made. That's where we have to decide which of those improvements best align with our vision for the project, which might yield accessibility or sustainability benefits that would see those numbers, this bigger picture improve. I thought it was important to acknowledge as well when we make those decisions.

Speaker 2: Who do we have in mind? This is a very important mindset thing that I think people should be aware of, which is that when it comes to decisions for the white tail products, we think of future users, is how we frame it. and future users are both our existing users, people like you all in this uh in this webinar, but also new people that come to the project. not necessarily with any prior knowledge of CMS, of Django, of Wagtail, of course. And when I mentioned those um 30% growth per year, um figures earlier on in my talk. That was so we could get to this point where we understand what it means in practice, which is that a large portion of fractal users have been added for very little time.

Speaker 2: And we have to decide how we make wagtail compelling for them, how we make wagtail work for them, how we make sure that there aren't too many decisions for them to make. that might uh lead to problematic outcomes. Just drawing this a bit more from like just a one-year growth picture to the three-year growth picture. After three years of people arriving to the project like this, it means we have way more of those new users that have rid recently adopted Wagtail than of the previous users. So it's really critical again that we build for those new people. just as much as the existing users and be care very careful to hear the feedback from those new people as well. Wagteil has a like strong enough moat, so to speak, as a very good

Speaker 2: open source CMS. the number one CMS in Python, which is the number one programming language, but our context does change and we need to hear from those new users as well. And when I say uh our context does change, I thought I'd showcase two specific examples. I won't go into the details, but it's very interesting. I think if you want to dive a bit deeper. which is uh when we process uh image uploads in the CMS, how much or how little of the image metadata we keep, and when we create more optimized images. how optimized we make them. These are I think excellent examples of how those kinds of decisions on defaults in the CMS matter. And yeah, there's a much bigger topic looming ahead, which is our

Speaker 2: take on AI. When I mention new users coming to the CMS, when I mentioned the industry changing. AI is the obvious way in which it's happening in this day and age and the obvious thing that I think as technologists we need to explore responsibly. When I say responsibly, again I mentioned this theme being our responsibility as tech people, some of you here might have been watching the Sora launch from OpenAI. they use the term responsibly as well. I don't know if we have the same definition for it. I don't think I want to have AI generated videos in my talk, so not sure you wanna do that either. It's just a content warning here that To me this um paints a pretty bleak picture of the future of technology

Speaker 2: if we let those people decide how this technology is put to use. There are lots of very good things with AI for us to do in Wagtail and also lots of very dystopian scenarios. And I really think it's important that we keep those two options in mind when we make decisions. Back when Wagtail was made, uh 11 years ago now, the zen of Wagtail was created to explain where Wagtail shines. what this design philosophy is and some aspects of this very much still relevant. Some aspects I think might be needing tweaking in this day and age. So this last point in particular, the best user interface for a programmer is usually a programming language. All those terms here I think warrant revisiting

Speaker 2: what's the best user interface, what's the programmer. What even is the need of a programming language in this day and age? Obviously right now, 2025, we still need those things. Five years from now I can't tell anymore So we have to be open about that and um yeah work on it as a group. Um yeah, more about Sora. I'll skip over that in the interest of time and take you to one example of what it means in practice in Wactev, which is our image management form. I'm sure lots of people here can see obvious uses of AI in this type of form. I'll challenge you to find five different uses of AI on there and think of the problems that might come up with some of them. Our

Speaker 2: strips skip straight to a specific problem we've been dealing with as we adopt AI in the CMS, which is alt text We have a lot of sites where image descriptions are really poor. Statistics for white sites is 40% of image alt text is just one word. That's not necessarily a problem in its own right, but it does indicate a likely issue that this alt text needs to be longer. And it turns out AI is excellent at generating alt text. But it's also very excellent at generating biased alt text. So here we're looking at a specific example from another speaker's talk, Leonie Watson at Pixel Pioneers. She was explaining how this image of a a blind person with a cane, this image was misrepresented by AI as being about a visually impaired

Speaker 2: person. Their cane here being white and red, that means that they are visually impaired and also their hearing is impaired, they are deaf and blind. That's a very important part of their identity, exactly the type of thing that AI might miss. So very clear benefits of better alt text, very clear risks of biased alt text. The carbon footprint of AI is another obvious problem where you know smaller systems, more automation, clear opportunity to reduce the footprint of the industry. But at the same time, that does come at a cost of more processing. There's no magic here. It really is just time spent by a server somewhere processing data.

Speaker 2: And it's just important that we are aware that this processing doesn't come for free, even though we might not be paying for it at this point in time, while this is sponsored by the big tech companies. So yeah, when it comes to Wagtail, plain and simple, we thought we needed a new set of principles that would guide us in our adoption of AI, bearing in mind we do want to explore this space But we need to be very careful under what terms do we do that. And when I say we are in this space, I think it's important that we as the overall tech community spend time in there building AI with those principles in mind and um Yeah, for what for alt

Speaker 2: text coming back to this same example. This just means designing the feature so that it's opt-in. so that people, humans, have to make a choice on which alt text is the best one so they have clear opportunity to tweak that alt text after entry. So yes, that's my plea to you all and where I'll end this talk. Get involved. We need people with plenty of different types of expertise, not just devs. That's the premise for this new Wagtail space online and plenty of different degrees of optimism and skepticism for AI in particular. And I'd like to invite you in particular to join us at the community day at Wagtail Space where I hope we'll have time to discuss those topics in more depth.

Speaker 1: Thank you so much, Tebow. All right, y'all, we have time for a few questions. If you'd like to put your questions either in the Q<unk>A section or in the chat, we will get them to Tebow here. All right, looks like we got one question. Oh no, it's not a question. It's Tim using the wrong area instead of the chat. All right. We have a question from Michael asking, are you generating graphics directly from Wagtail?

Speaker 2: All of this is Only me in Google Docs. There is no Wagtail involved here, nor AI with any of the content. It's definitely possible to build talks in Wagtail. I have in the past. And um yeah, I think there's a package there coming up. I have tried to do it for today, but run out of time.

Speaker 1: We have another question down in the chat. Do you have any tips for monitoring one's own data slash tokens slash energy usage? caused by LLMs.

Speaker 2: Oh good question. Um I think uh the first thing to be aware of is it's not really as hard as anyone makes it sound. um the energy usage of AI really is proportional to the number of tokens and having some awareness of which model is being used behind the scenes. So if you want to get started, the best is just to know how many tokens any AI use you're doing is producing or just you roughly how many characters. And then there's excellent tools out there that tell you from that the energy usage. I guess if I was to plug one, it's called EcoLogit. Ecologates. ai, I believe, is the domain name. And they allow you to visualize the footprint of specific uh LLMs across different sizes of response.

Speaker 2: And just being aware that when you make those decisions to use AI, it can be a factor of 100 between the very optimized smaller models. and the bigger ones. So it makes a big difference which model you use, not just the quantity of usage you're doing.

Speaker 1: Alright, we have another question from Yusuf. I am new to Wagtail. I learned Udoo by reading ebooks and watching videos, but for Wagtail, it seems that We have only Wagtail 6. 4. Yusuf wants to know how do I learn Wagtail 7 Plus in a structured way besides the documentation.

Speaker 2: Well when you say besides the documentation, I'll definitely shout out that first because compared to other projects we have spent a lot of time creating a 10-step tutorial that takes you all the way from first getting started to deployed websites and that has taken a long a long time to get right and I think for good reasons. If you want to go beyond that, I think these days I would recommend checking out our demo website That is a very very good demo of what White Tile looks like on a real project. There are some issues here and there, but really this could take you through creating a site that's live and serves real users.

Speaker 1: I will also go ahead and shout out the Wagtail Starter Kit as well. That is a very useful way to learn about structuring a project. All right. Okay, I have another question here. For those of us who want to contribute beyond code, say in documentation, UX research, or community advocacy. What kind of contributions are most impactful right now?

Speaker 2: For most impactful is hard to answer because honestly I feel like lots of developers gradually naturally are attracted to contributing to open source. So we have no shortage of code contributions. Everything else we need more of. So I think in particular UX and docs, that's excellent topics. uh when it comes to research between those two things I would say something uh is accessibility and better defaults and just generally having the time to research those defaults. So I shouted out two things during my talk. The default behavior of our when we process image uploads, keep or remove metadata. That's a really good example of something that takes time to dive in and no coding expertise required.

Speaker 2: It's just spending time looking at how other systems do it And otherwise I'd say probably shout out to our UI team who's gonna be involved at the community day and uh working on UX in the CMS. So if that sounds like your thing. Uh I think we'll announce the plans for that team on the community day in a few hours and um yeah, join and see what's going on there