Wagtailers spread their wings at PyCon 2024
Our community members came together to represent Wagtail at the largest Python conference in the United States
Multiple members our community traveled to Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to represent Wagtail CMS at PyCon US 2024. This year, PyCon US brought together around 2,700 Python enthusiasts from all across the world for nine days of tutorials, talks, sprints, and meetups.
On the first official day of PyCon US, Scott Cranfill and me (Meagen Voss) co-taught a tutorial on How to Build More Accessible Websites with Wagtail. We had a very engaged group of students who left the classroom with best practices and approaches for improving the accessibility of their websites. If you want to learn more about accessibility best practices too, you can try out our workshop for yourself by going to our workshop repository on GitHub.
When the main talks began on Friday, we teamed up with Jeff Triplett from the Django community to host a Wagtail and Django Open Space event. PyCon US provides Open Space conference rooms that anyone can sign up for to discuss topics that fascinate them whether they are related to Python or other interests like juggling, math, or dancing. A bunch of people showed up to ask us questions about Django and Wagtail and learn from our community members whether either framework would be a good fit for future projects.
On the last day of talks, the expo hall was converted into a poster session and job fair space. Vince Salvino presented a poster he co-created with Thibaud Colas on Building Accessible Websites with Wagtail and Django. They showed how the number of common accessibility errors that are flagged by the Wagtail accessibility checker went down between 2023 and 2024. You can see a PDF version of their poster, and Thibaud also did a more detailed write up of his findings for Global Accessibility Awareness Day.
We all left PyCon US 2024 with plenty of new friends, lots of good ideas for Wagtail, and the rules to a card game called Cabo that you really should try. Now, we're looking forward to catching up with more of our US community members on the other side of the Pennsylvania Turnpike in Philadelphia on June 20-22. We hope to see you there!
