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30 Jan 2017

Core team expansion

We're building the core team to accelerate the project

Tom Dyson

Tom Dyson

Director, Torchbox

As the Wagtail community grows (we're currently at #9 out of the top 100 CMS projects on Github), we need to adapt and expand the team of developers who manage the project. We've recently taken two steps, one symbolic, the other concrete.

Github organisation

Wagtail was built by Torchbox, and was released at github.com/torchbox/wagtail. In the intervening years we've looked at moving away from /torchbox/, but without much enthusiasm (particularly from me); we're very proud of Wagtail at Torchbox and were reluctant to give up the reflected glory bestowed by the URL namespace. Moreover, the dormant owner of github.com/wagtail/ didn't respond to our requests to let us have it. In the end, we accepted that the benefits of a vendor-neutral Github organisation outweighed the vanity perks to Torchbox, and Rob persuaded the nice people at Github to hand over the username. Now it's done we're all happy that it was the right decision.

Double the team

The Wagtail team at Torchbox was joined soon after launch by our lovely friends from Springload (New Zealand) and Takeflight (Australia). Despite a couple of individual changes, there have been five core developers since early 2015. During 2016 we had growing support from the expert and enthusiastic Django community in the Netherlands, and we are delighted that three of them accepted our invitations to join the core team.

There are currently nine core team members, six of whom are coming to the Reykjavik Sprint. If you're interested in joining this team, get in touch. We don't think there's a hard maximum to the size of the core team, and participants don't need hard-core programming skills – help with documentation, planning and community support would be very enthusiastically received.