Our four contributors for Google Summer of Code 2026
Four projects will focus on revitalizing the Starter Kit, the Bakery Demo, the Wagtail User Guide, and translation scaling in wagtail-localize
We're excited to share that Wagtail once again has four fantastic projects for Google Summer of Code (GSoC)! These projects will help us update the Wagtail Starter Kit and the Wagtail Bakery demo as well as help us revitalize the Wagtail Guide website and scale translations with the wagtail-localize package. Let's meet our contributors and discover more about their plans for GSoC.
Raghad Dahi: Wagtail Guide revamp
Raghad Dahi is a second-year computer science student from Egypt. She has open-source experience from contributing to Organic Maps last year through the GSoC program. She loves working on exciting and useful projects that a lot of people use like Wagtail. In her free time, she loves creating crochet gifts for loved ones and also enjoys doing calisthenics and playing tennis.
Raghad will be working on updating the Wagtail User Guide website so that we can offer multilingual support, creating a system to automate our versioning of the guide, and other improvements to make the guide easier to maintain and use. "What I am looking forward to the most is building a complete translation system," she says. "Having every page translated using DeepL will improve the experience for Wagtail developers worldwide. I am also excited about the versioning automation, which will help save the Wagtail maintainers time and effort."
Srishti Jaiswal: Demo website redesign
Srishti Jaiswal is from Varanasi, India, where she is a final-year student pursuing an Integrated Dual Degree (BTech + MTech) in Mathematics and Computing from the Indian Institute of Technology (BHU) Varanasi. She's expected to graduate in 2026. When she's not studying, she loves going for long walks, gazing at the stars and clouds, and connecting with river spots for hours. She also enjoys roaming around and visiting new places.
Srishti will be redesigning the Wagtail Bakery demo website so that it shows off more of Wagtail's fantasic features. She'll be collaborating with the Wagtail UI team to implement their updated designs. "I'm looking forward to turning the UI team’s design discussions into real, reviewable improvements in the Bakery demo. I’m especially excited about turning the Wagtail Bakery into a demo that is more modern, scalable, and flexible for different real-world content scenarios so it can show Wagtail’s strengths more clearly."
Aryan Khandhadiya: Starter kit upgrade
Aryan Khandhadiya is a final-year Computer Science (AI & ML) student at RCOEM, Nagpur, India. He's contributed to open-source projects, including Microsoft Semantic Kernel, SHAP, and Wagtail. He's passionate about autonomous AI systems, bug bounty hunting, and building tools that solve real problems. When he's not coding, he goes swimming or plays video games and sometimes goes for a run. He enjoys tinkering with homelabs and running AI agents on constrained hardware to see how far he can push them.
For GSoC, Aryan will be helping us update our news-template Starter Kit to make it easier to use and maintain. He says, "I'm most excited about making the Wagtail Starter Kit genuinely beginner-friendly across all platforms — especially improving the cross-platform developer experience so that someone on Windows can get up and running just as smoothly as on Mac or Linux."
Rodrigo Yáñez: Scaling translations in wagtail-localize
Rodrigo Yáñez is a web developer based in Alicante, Spain who works mainly with Python, Django, and Wagtail CMS. He's also an economist and a translator. He started learning to code about six years ago through online courses, including CS50, and later completed an intensive backend development course in Python through Talento Futuro in Chile. Rodrigo plays the saxophone and the guitar, and he enjoys practicing jazz improvisation.
For his project, Rodrigo will be working on building ways to make the translation workflows in the wagtail-localize package more efficient. Right now, the workflows query the database more often than necessary, which can slow things down in projects with large amounts of content and multiple locals. "I’ve been working with Wagtail professionally for a while," says Rodrigo. "But day-to-day work doesn’t leave much room to really go deep into how things work under the hood. I’m most excited about having this project as an actual reason to study the codebase properly and understand it well."
We're thrilled to welcome Raghad, Srishti, Aryan, and Rodrigo to the Wagtail community! We're looking forward to seeing how their projects progress over the summer. We have no doubt they'll make great contributions.