CMS with AI, not AI CMS: Wagtail 8.0’s new API
Automating content operations, with or without agents
Wagtail’s just-released 8.0 release notes are very unusual. Zero admin UI improvements in the highlights, even though UX is one of Wagtail’s biggest strengths. We made a strategic choice to focus on a shiny new API instead. Here’s why you should start using it.
50+ admin operations ready for automation
The v3 API is opt-in. You can start using it on any project with about three lines of code:
INSTALLED_APPS += ["wagtail.api.v3"] from wagtail.api.v3.urls import api urlpatterns += [path("api/v3-preview/", api.urls)] # Don’t actually write it like that 👀. You get the point.
From this, you get:
- 50+ admin operations across pages, images, documents, and many more.
- A fully documented and typed API, with auto-generated Open API schema.
- Built-in support for rich text as Markdown. For personal preference, and agents.
- API endpoints for your own Django models, for those who use Wagtail as a Django admin alternative.
Oh and, you also get beautiful API docs on top:
This is possible with part dark magic, part type hints checked with ty and processed with Django Ninja 🥷 and Pydantic.
It comes with public / anonymous access so headless sites and other publication mechanisms can transition off the v2 API. And for private data, it’s protected with bearer token auth and Wagtail’s permissions model.
More flexibility, faster pace
Some of our users want to dial up the quality to 11 with carefully choreographed automated and manual content reviews, some just want their final draft copy-pasted and live without mistakes. We want to support those advanced and sped-up workflows, so we arrive at a kind of "choose your own adventure" admin / content operations framework. You can keep using only the admin UI, or go API only. Or case-by-case; use the (necessary) friction of an admin that encourages higher quality for some pages. Do bulk SEO improvements with a scripted API.
For example, here’s what it looks like to ask OpenCode to fix a page’s search description:
This is with DeepSeek V4 Flash running in TensorX, but any agent will support this!
CMS with AI, not AI CMS
This is all part of working within our AI guiding principles. There won’t be any ✨ magic sparkles ✨ AI buttons in your admin unless you decide to install Wagtail AI. But if you want more agentic help, now you can. The new v3 API operations are ideal for agents, whether used directly with curl, or via MCP.
And if you prefer more deterministic operations, scripting of common tasks is closer than ever! Personally I’m really looking forward to writing little clients / scripts with LLMs to help with:
- Faster publication of articles I wrote in Markdown.
- Getting a report of all unpublished pages and unused images to clean up.
- Generic content importers, moving content between systems with a 100-line script rather than weeks of work.
Feedback needed
Start using the API and tell us what you want to do with it, what you did, what works, what doesn’t! We’re releasing it as a preview in Wagtail 8.0, so we can adapt it based on feedback ahead of v8.1 in a few weeks. Join the feedback discussion in GitHub, even if just to share your ideas.
And make sure to sign up and propose talks for Wagtail Space 2026, so we can all see what everyone has been building with this new capability in our platform!