Our four contributors for Google Summer of Code 2025
Four projects to improve sustainability, security, UX, DX
We're excited to announce that Wagtail has four fantastic projects running for Google Summer of Code (GSoC) this year! These projects are set to enhance Wagtail's sustainability, security, user experience, and developer-friendliness. Let's meet our contributors and discover their plans for this summer.
Rohit Sharma – Grid-Aware Websites
Our first contributor is Rohit Sharma, from UIT-RGPV in Bhopal, India. Rohit is a final-year Computer Science Engineering student. Rohit will work on reducing Wagtail websites’ carbon footprint. By integrating the Green Web Foundation's Grid-Aware Websites toolkit, the sites will dynamically adjust functionality to reduce energy consumption when the user's local grid relies more heavily on fossil fuels.
In Rohit’s words, we seek to demonstrate the practical application of grid-aware principles in content management systems, contributing to the broader goal of mitigating the environmental impact of the internet, with data centers projected to account for up to 5% of global electricity demand by 2030.
Chiemezuo Akujobi – Content Security Policy (CSP) Compatibility
We are joined again by Chiemezuo Akujobi from Abuja, Nigeria. Chiemezuo contributed to Wagtail during GSoC 2024, and is taking part of the GSoC program again to go further with this open source involvement. This year, he is tackling CSP compatibility, a crucial security feature that prevents certain web vulnerabilities. Chiemezuo will ensure Wagtail’s core functionalities are fully compatible with strict CSP settings, so we can encourage broad adoption of the technology across the ecosystem.
One key aspect of Chiemezuo’s proposal is to contribute to CSP support in Django itself, by reviewing and providing feedback on existing efforts to bring CSP in core Django. This will prove a challenging task, but one with the potential to bring CSP support to even more projects.
Joel William – Enhancing Image and Document Listings
Joel William, joining from Jaipur, India, is a Bachelor’s student in Computer Science at Poornima University. Joel’s project aims to improve the usability of Wagtail’s image and document listings by introducing clear usage counts and options for sorting and filtering.
Joel explains, “Users must inspect individual items or navigate to usage reports, which adds unnecessary steps, requiring extra clicks, page reloads, and additional server requests. This inefficiency not only impacts user experience but also increases system load, leading to higher resource consumption, which in turn increases Wagtail’s impact on the environment making it less sustainable.”
Dhruvi Patel – Improving Keyboard Shortcuts
Dhruvi Patel is a software engineer based in Ottawa, Canada. She plans to enhance Wagtail’s keyboard shortcuts system, increasing the number of shortcuts across the UI. This will make the Wagtail admin more accessible, and faster to navigate. Dhruvi’s proposal also includes adding a search/filter feature within the keyboard shortcuts UI.
In her proposal, Dhruvi says, "As someone who relies heavily on keyboard shortcuts during development, I saw an opportunity to significantly improve the user experience through enhanced shortcut support."
This certainly aligns well with our goals to make Wagtail more accessible, and more powerful for beginners and power users alike!
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We warmly welcome Rohit, Chiemezuo, Joel, and Dhruvi, and we’re looking forward to seeing their projects flourish over the coming months! And if you want to hear more about the projects, come say hi in our next What’s new in Wagtail.
