Wagtail in industry: from farming to finance

Speaker 1: Hello everyone and welcome to this session by Vince Salvino today. We'll get going. We will have a little bit of time for a couple of questions at the end, but if you have more questions after the session, then feel free to message Vince. He'll be hanging around in the lobby between talks and things like that to send them over after. So I am delighted to introduce Vince who is technical director at Code Red. a Wagtail Core contributor and a member of the Django Software Foundation. And his talk, Wagtail in Industry from Farming to Finance, is going to take us on an interesting journey through some unexpected places where Wagtail is being used. I will hand over to you, Vince.

Speaker 2: Thanks, Lisa. So hi everyone, I'm Vince. You may have seen me at DjangoCon and uh other uh Python-related events. So um I'm going to talk about some different industries where Wagtail is used because we work on so many different sites and you know you've all seen some of the big flagship sites you know that Tebow mentioned in his talk that are big Wagtail sites, but There's actually a ton of smaller sites that are using Wagtail that no one ever knows about. So I just think these are some really interesting stories. And this is where I'm coming from. So I'm with Code Red, we're a small agency who builds a lot of Wagtail sites. We've been doing Django since 2012 and we were early adopters of Wagtail in 2016.

Speaker 2: So we've built probably over a hundred sites using Wagtail just that we've built But on top of that, we do a lot of hosting as well of Wagtail sites. So we've hosted over a thousand Django Wagtail sites just throughout the years with our hosting platform, Code Red Cloud. It's a dedicated Wagtail and Django hosting platform. So between all this experience, you know, in the past uh 10 plus years, we've just seen so many different things. And the main question I always get asked is, can you use Wagtail 4? Dot dot dot Um and then usually it's a specific industry. Oh, can you use Wagtail in healthcare? Could you use Wagtail for a university?

Speaker 2: You know, uh could you use Wagtail for an insurance company? Uh different things like this that people ask. The answer is always yes, of course. So I want to show you some unusual applications of Wagtail that really kind of keep the gears of business and turning day to day. So the first one we're going to look at is some industrial automation. Not exactly what you'd expect a CMS to be used for. But let's start with the farm. Consider the farm, right? Especially here in the US, we've got some massive farms producing hundreds or thousands of tons of product, right? And this might be this product eventually gets harvested and shipped off by truck and train, and we're talking massive amounts here.

Speaker 2: And eventually this needs to be stored in silos or tanks of some sort. And you can kind of see by the picture just the sheer size of these silos. So one of our customers works in this industry, and this is an actual picture of one of their facilities. that is going to be relevant to the Wagtail story. And each of those white dots on this screen is actually a gigantic tank. You can see in the picture here, that's actually a semi-truck. So these tanks are large enough that a semi-truck could actually drive inside of them, turn all the way around, and drive back out. That's how big they are And this other thing in the picture is actually a train.

Speaker 2: And those are all freight cars that are or tanks that are used for moving product in and out of these tanks. So you can just see the shear size and the shear volume. And this is just one facility that processes food. So they make food products and they're storing stuff in these tanks. Um to keep out track of how much um material is in these tanks, uh this uh customer of ours makes sensors. And you can see that there's a sensor, it's kind of bolted on to the top of the tank there. There are wireless monitors that monitor the level of the tank, how full it is. And those transmit over a wireless uh cell signal.

Speaker 2: Um every every so many minutes they're updating. Um And there's also digital displays that are on them. Some of them work in the factory to give real-time information like you know, within less than seconds, milliseconds, how full these tanks are. So when they have a truck coming in, filling up a tank, you know, you can watch the level just go up and up in the tank through these sensors. So this is a lot of data that's coming in. Some of it comes in periodically through CSV files via the cell network. Some of it comes in real time in the factory floor, and all of this is getting fed into Django powered APIs. So all of this data gets sent to a dashboard where you can see all of the tanks

Speaker 2: in real time, filling up and down, color-coded by product. And this is used on the factory floor by a lot of the workers there. And you can see the sheer size of these. These are hundreds or thousands of tons of material that's in these tanks. And this is just another view that shows like a really big, a big view with a lot of tanks on it. So this software is all implemented with Django and Wagtail. And it's some pretty heavy data. So the tanks, the measurements, and the calculations, uh, because of being able to calculate the amount of product based on different scientific calculations, such as the density of the product, the you know, um

Speaker 2: all that kind of stuff. Uh that's all managed in an interface and Wagtail makes that easy uh for custom for uh the admins to set all that data up Customers also log into this and they can you know manage their tanks, see them on a map, all that good stuff. And there's a lot of data flowing through this system as well. We're talking over a hundred million measurements uh that are in here uh because these tanks are constantly updating in real time. So this is kind of a really interesting use. It's not so much of Wagtail as a content management system, but it's Wagtail being used still to manage uh data and to manage uh configuration for a dashboard. And of course Django is used very heavily throughout.

Speaker 2: So that's sort of one potentially interesting setup. The other thing that I want to talk about is e-commerce. And we get asked this all the time. And that is, can Wagtail do e-commerce? Uh it's a very uh almost a sore subject because it comes up so much. Um While Wagtail is not out of the box an e-commerce, it's not the same as like a Shopify. Wagtail is used for e-commerce in many different scenarios. And especially any of you watching this who work at a business probably know that your business has its own unusual workflow for doing e-commerce. It's not the same as selling t-shirts exactly.

Speaker 2: So Let's look at a different industry. Let's talk about sanitation, right? Garbage trucks. It's a critical load-bearing part of our society, it really is. And a similar vocational type of industry line workers. Trimming trees, doing forestry management, working on power lines, you know, these are like critical parts of our our infrastructure. And what do these two industries have in common is that they need big trucks, heavy machinery. This is from a customer of ours called Battle Motors and they make garbage trucks, they make driller rigs, they make uh bucket trucks for doing forestry management.

Speaker 2: And uh they have even gotten into zero emissions trucks as well. So this is like a new leading uh thing for them, um, kind of playing off of Tebow's uh carbon uh neutral metrics. So all these trucks need parts. As I mentioned, these are called vocational trucks. They are working day in, day out, doing really hard jobs. Okay, and they need a lot of maintenance. They need parts. But of course, like I mentioned, this is a business and You can't exactly sell parts like you sell t-shirts. You need to go through a workflow that is been deeply ingrained for, you know, decades. with dealerships, vendors that sell the parts, parts that match certain models of certain trucks.

Speaker 2: So it's a little bit more complicated than the average e-commerce workflow Of course, it's been flowing through Excel. You know, Excel is sort of the source of truth and it's the main way that this has been managed so far. So how can we adapt this Excel workflow using Wagtail to speed up this interaction for customers so that they can find the parts they need and buy those parts sooner? So we did build an e-commerce. This one was actually sort of an embeddable e-commerce that is powered by Wagtail, but it can be embedded into other websites. So this is just an example of you can see it's almost a little bit reminiscent of Excel. We've got that grid of part numbers there.

Speaker 2: They can click add to cart, they can search by the the grid of part numbers I think there's like thousands of thousand, tens of thousands of parts that have been added to this site. And it goes through a sort of a distributor. It'll send this order to your sales rep so that your sales rep can then review this and another thing that was important for them was customizing this because you know their their branding is really important they want to make sure that this matches up with their site So this is this is a cool feature of Wagtail that has been added in the past couple versions, I think, maybe a few years ago. The ability to customize the colors, the logos, the branding, you know, and I know it's a little thing. But when a customer sees something like this, it really elevates the experience

Speaker 2: versus looking at a stock, you know, off-the-shelf uh looking software. They see that it matches them, they see that it fits their brand. And you know, you can they can go in here, they can use their Excel files to upload and download products, you know, import and export from Excel. So it meets their workflow really well and they can also manage their orders and stuff here. So Wagtail is really this kind of hub for them of being able to manage uh parts for these heavy trucks. And then we can look at a completely different industry, but still in the e-commerce realm, and that is healthcare. So I often get asked if Wagtail can be used for healthcare, especially during the pandemic.

Speaker 2: You know, we were building healthcare sites like crazy because there was just so much need in that industry. And this is a really cool example of something we built. It's called Register My Test. And this was a really innovative company that was selling at-home COVID testing kits. But these were not just the typical swab. They could test for a huge amount of uh viruses and different respiratory illnesses. So this was actually a kit that you would buy. You would take it at home. And then you would mail it back to a lab and you would go through an online sort of enter all of your health information. So this is a case where we have Wagtail managing HIPAA compliant information.

Speaker 2: Very heavily regulated, very high security environment. It's integrating with and sending data to the actual lab that's processing these tests. So there's a tight level of integration and the scientific world, there's a HIPAA, there's security, you know, it's doing a lot of things that you don't typically associate with Wagtail. But in this case, you could buy a test, you would enter all of your health information and your personal information, your health history, etc. And then you would send this back. And we did actually build a little progress checker that was in the dashboard so customers could watch. It took typically took about three days. end-to-end for the lab to get your test, process it, and then give you your test results back. All this was managed in a dashboard

Speaker 2: that the customer could see and in the back end it was all handled by Wagtail And one really great thing about this was on top of the fact that they could manage their orders for the e-commerce aspect, we could give support people limited access to just certain areas of the Wagtail admin So that, you know, a support person could maybe only see orders but not see personal health information. And, you know, if a customer called in and complained and said, where's my order at? Or it hasn't shipped yet, or can you give me the tracking info? They could go in here. And once again, we're not selling t-shirts. We're selling stuff that has to get sent to and from a lab. So it's a little bit different of a workflow.

Speaker 2: And that's why Wagtail works really well for e-commerce. It's not so much that it's a ready-made e-commerce platform, but it lets you really customize this workflow that's super unique to a business. So um okay we're gonna take a complete left turn here and going from uh you know custom business workflows to looking at something that is just purely a marketing and a portfolio standpoint. And I get asked about this a lot as well because people want to see a very flashy, you know, some people come to Wagtail and they're expecting a really high uh visual interaction sort of level and once again

Speaker 2: that's not something Wagtail does out of the box it doesn't give you designs it's not a design system per se But it enables the developer to build very intricate designs. So here's the finance part of the talk. This is an investment company. that we've worked with. They do venture capital. They do, you know, they have a portfolio of businesses that they work with. So this is more of a marketing site. This is more of a portfolio site. And there's this has got like a fancy video background, you know, clicking on the video, it opens up uh you know a side panel of different investments, so it's a very high interaction site. Similarly, on another level, this is a real estate management company that owns a bunch of properties in our hometown of Cleveland.

Speaker 2: They own a bunch of theaters, they own a bunch of buildings, and they're using Wagtail to sort of have a property management and asset management portal for their customers So the customers have to log in. And this is just using Wagtails page privacy. So it's really nice because they could upload. documents, you know, blueprint prints or floor plans or different, you know, rent disclosure documents. And they can just very simply put that in a password protected area and the Wagtail admin and their customers can see that their commercial customers can log in and see a list of all their documents. You know, so it works really well for managing sort of a portfolio of assets. And uh the other one that I will show you on the marketing and portfolio side is

Speaker 2: uh somebody who has You know, they're just doing uh sort of job-powered uh sort of a job search in a sense, but it's uh more of a inclusive kind of a uh prosperity bringing prosperity to the region. So they're using it more in a you know visual marketing side of things, uh informational sites. So of course Wagtail shines in these types of scenarios. You can build, you know, video backgrounds and full, you know custom you know full screen visuals, uh charts, graphs, things like that can be built into Wagtail and managed pretty easily from the admin. So

Speaker 2: another odd use for Wagtail, I shouldn't say odd, but it's sort of a when we think of content, we think of um web content usually articles, blogs, right? That's usually what comes to mind. But cataloging information is actually a a very strong suit for Wagtail. So because Wagtail is very, I'll say almost data-oriented in a sense, you know, the backend you can create different page types, different models, it all matches up neatly to a database. Uh Wagtail is used for managing very large data sets. And I have seen Wagtail instances with millions of pages or millions of uh snippets

Speaker 2: or uh some sort of data uh structure um and it it can definitely handle that quite easily. So let's take a completely different industry here and look at an electric electronic manufacturing company. So they make parts uh that are used in you know chips, capacitors, antennas, all kinds of stuff like that. Once again, an industry you don't typically think of when you think of a Wagtail site. Um, but because there are so many tiny electronics components Um they actually have millions of parts. These are tiny little parts, they're sourced from all around the world. And they had sort of an existing database. So this was a Wagtail migration project with

Speaker 2: an existing database of millions of parts. It was a MySQL database, so Wagtail plays very nicely with that. We were able to incorporate that into the Wagtail site so they can actually go through and search, you know, all of these millions of of parts and see all of the part information. It's not quite an e-commerce flow because um They're not selling them directly, but it's uh once again more of a custom business workflow where they are um You know, these parts are available for sale. They have to be searched and find based on a lot of scientific information, frequencies, harmonics, attenuation, you know, a lot of really uh scientific uh specific things So

Speaker 2: it's a it's a super good system for organizing information, you know, having different search abilities in Wagtail, having sort of the different chooser, you know, snippet choosers and things like that. and the ability to manage documents as well, which has a really good document search tagging, categories of the like collections, things like that. can be used to organize this information. So with this electronic site, they've got over two million products. They've got uh thousands uh almost nearly 10,000 uh different documents and downloads and these are like software downloads firmware updates you know all this kind of stuff is managed in their Wagtail instance And on top of that, they actually have multiple sites. So they're using the multi-site feature

Speaker 2: where they have sort of a child like parent-child company kind of setup. And a lot of these uh some of the multi-sites share different products between them. So you might find um A product listed on both sites. You might find a product that's unique to one site. All of that's possible within Wagtail due to the multi-site setup. So I'll speed up a little bit here because I have a couple more industries to get through. Next we're going to talk about the education industry. This is a big one. There's a lot of universities and different higher ed and even K through 12 that's adopting Wagtail. So uh this is a relatively newer customer of ours, but they have a Wagtail site that's a very a very heavily built-out

Speaker 2: Wagtail site It's also used for collecting information. So courses, curriculum, all kinds of stuff is managed here. Teachers can log in and build their lesson plans. Um, you know, entire school districts will sign up for this and get access to this site so that they can use uh information um and you know all of their staff members and teachers can get this information it's all searchable it's all filterable Um, you know, there's a lot going on. It's a very busy active site. A lot of customers are logging in using this, and it's entirely wagtail powered. Um It also has a very deep integration with Salesforce. So a lot of user permissions, a lot of user accounts,

Speaker 2: sales like leads for when a new school district wants to sign up. The leads will get you know funneled into Salesforce so that a salesperson can reach out and then set them up as a partner in Salesforce and then that will kind of sync back down to the website. So there's a very tight Salesforce integration There's a lot of uh content managed in this site, and it's very heavily used by like, you know, hundreds or thousands of people every day are logging in and getting this information. So um, you know, education is just uh I I think academics are naturally very organized people. It's you know part of the smarts that they have. And uh they're definitely very smart for choosing Wagtail because um it it's it's It's very well adapted to managing that kind of information.

Speaker 2: So this is, you know, there's some universities, there's all kinds of things that are using Wagtail as well. It's very popular in that industry. just because it makes it so easy to manage information. And then the last thing that I'll talk about here is sort of date, times, and places. This is information that is historically a little bit tricky to work with because you know you've got events and you think, okay, a date and a time, you know, easy, text field, whatever. But things that recur, you know, every Friday, the third Friday of the month, uh, you know, uh every other Monday bi-weekly, you know, and then when you factor in places into this, you're doing geocoding, you're doing mapping you're kind of, you know, it's very temporal. So, you know, Wagtail can be used for this as well.

Speaker 2: Once again, it's not the kind of plate, it's not the kind of system that is out of the box has a bunch of event and geocoding tools. But the overall Django ecosystem has a lot of tools for that. And Wagtail is just, once again, it's a great tool for managing this content. So you can build calendars, you can build, you know. mapped you can build stuff like this using Wagtail and use it to sort of publish this information and then you can also have editors come in and quite easily you know Go into the Wagtail admin, add some dates and times, set up some recurrence. You know, it's almost like an Outlook calendar. You can build that kind of functionality in Wagtail to be able to manage the events.

Speaker 2: So yeah, these are just some of the challenges that that come with the event management, you know, as I mentioned, geocoding things doing event recurrence, showing the relevant stuff to your user based on the current date and their current location and things like that. So going back to my original question, can you use Wagtail for dot dot dot? Uh absolutely you can. Wagtail is designed to be highly customized. It's not ready-made. You know, in none of these uh industries that I've showed you has there been a a pre-made wagtail for it, but It's very low maintenance, it's a very low learning curve, which is important for staff. And as you can see, many different industries are doing very creative things with their wagtail sites.

Speaker 2: So I'm just uh continually very interested when I see these and I just love working on these different kinds of um you know uh unusual situations and It makes it really fun and Wagtail is just such a great fit. So anyhow, I'm wrapping up here. Thank you very much. I'll be available for questions in the lobby or I don't know. We might be at time, Lisa.

Speaker 1: I think we've got I think we've got time for one or two. And any that we I've saved them also, any that we don't get to. Thank you, Vince. They're brilliant examples. So the first one is from Eric. What makes you choose Wagtail over Django for the Industrial Site project? What does Wagtail let you or the clients do that Django wouldn't provide as easily?

Speaker 2: That's a great question. So my answer to that is typically we use Wagtail on pretty much everything, and especially in recent years. We will just throw Wagtail on any Django project, even if we're not using some of the Wagtail like page model features, etc. The reason for that is Wagtail has such a nice user interface that even if you've got two or three things that you might typically manage in the Django admin. You can just hook those up directly into the Wagtail admin. It used to be called model admin, but now it's snippets. So just throw your models in the Django snip in the snippets. Snippet admin and boom, you've got a really nice user interface that's a little bit more foolproof than giving someone access to the Django admin

Speaker 2: Um and uh it that's just an entry-level use of Wagtail that you can do just to make staff this your staff's lives easier.

Speaker 1: Brilliant. Thank you, Vince. And we have one from Tim Allen. The on-ramp to using Wagtail for e-commerce has always felt pretty steep. Do you think it would be worth the effort to have the Wagtail team focus on a more tightly coupled plug-and-play e-commerce package for Wagtail?

Speaker 2: Um this is obviously my personal opinion, but I absolutely do think that would be worthwhile. Um several years ago I did try to kind of gauge interest and consider doing maybe a Kickstarter or something to to build some of those features. There wasn't a ton of interest at the time, but it's probably the number one question I get asked is e-commerce, e-commerce, e-commerce. Maybe if it's not tightly integrated, a starter template would be a great idea as well, just to kind of show some typical workflows and kind of give an example. so that people can start with that example and then run with it. I think that would be extremely helpful. Yeah.

Speaker 1: Brilliant. I'm going to squeeze in one more as well. Sure. um who says I never see Wagtail used for a blog. Others would use ghost for. Ghost blogs are popular but the paywall is built in. Would you ever build a paywall directly into Wagtail, which would be optional, so I don't have to use Substack or Ghost.

Speaker 2: That's a great question as well. And I think that is another perfect example of the Wagtail is not ready-made for that, but it can very easily be adapted. We have built paywalls in Wagtail before or sort of if it's not a paywall, it's maybe an access, you know, age restriction, different things, you know, some kind of gate. That can absolutely be built in Wagtail. While I don't think that would maybe be make the most sense to be like a core feature of Wagtail, I I can definitely show you some examples of that being built in Wagtail.

Speaker 1: Brilliant. Thank you. I'm going to end there. I've got two more questions that I'll send to you, Vince, to answer, but I'll take some time to go and get to your next session. Thanks.

Speaker 2: Excellent. Thanks, everyone.