Up next on the roadmap
What’s coming to Wagtail in the next release
Wagtail ships on a predictable cycle: every four months, the community gets a fresh batch of improvements across usability, accessibility, performance, and developer experience.
With core contributors Sage Abdullah and Baptiste Mispelon, we took some time to unpack our roadmap for the next release: Wagtail 7.3, due in February 2026!
Here are the high-level items discussed, going beyond the details published on the Wagtail public roadmap.
Block settings
StreamField gives developers enormous freedom in shaping the editing experience. But this can sometimes lead to busy, hard‑to‑scan forms when content fields are mixed with configuration.
Block settings introduce a clearer separation. Developers can designate certain fields as "settings," and Wagtail will collapse them by default. Editors still have full control when they need it, but the primary content fields take centre stage. This feature lets sites reduce clutter without restructuring existing StreamField data.
This has been a long‑standing request in the community, and we expect almost all sites will want to leverage this feature -- in particular to expand their usage of StreamField, and make block types more reusable in different circumstances. For example via packages!
AI checker concepts
In the last release, we worked on new AI capabilities through the optional wagtail‑ai package. We plan to work on new features with a focus on content feedback: helping editors assess and improve content quality. Rather than a single, site‑wide feedback prompt, the new design allows for multiple targeted checks. We expect to be focusing on accessibility, SEO, and overall readability and tone of voice. And the first steps are underlying improvements that will support all sorts of checks:
Following our guiding principles for AI, these checks will be user‑initiated. This ensures transparency, having a human in the loop always, and avoids background processing that could have a huge energy footprint.
nd, as always, these features remain fully optional, model and provider-agnostic, and compatible with open weight models.
Model search improvements
Wagtail’s search backends recently moved to a separate django-modelsearch making it easier to maintain. And useful for the wider Django ecosystem! Search can appear simple on the surface but quickly becomes complex on large, long‑lived sites. Particularly when we support many different search backends.
As for the improvements, we kept this roadmap item very open‑ended (let us know what you would want !). The goal is to build on the new foundation with room for incremental improvements. Such as vector indexing, permission‑aware searching, and filtering on related objects.
Autosave MVP
Autosave has been on the roadmap for many years, and we expect to soon ship the next milestone: the ability to save a draft without reloading the page. It’s a small but foundational step toward a more resilient and modern editing experience. Once in place, this will reduce the risk of losing work due to session timeouts or network interruptions, and lay the groundwork for concurrent editing features.
llms.txt for docs
As AI tools become more common in our workflows, many developers rely on them to explore APIs, understand patterns, and troubleshoot issues. The llms.txt format offers a structured way to expose documentation to those tools. For v7.3, we intend to put it in place for both the developer documentation and the user guide. These will be tailored to different context window sizes and tested for quality so we know they constitute a tangible improvement over the status quo.
We hope in particular this will make it easier for Wagtail user to adopt new features as they get released!
Beyond the roadmap
A few noteworthy improvements are not listed as roadmap items but are already in flight.
Hooks for settings
Wagtail will offer hooks for its Settings feature, similar to snippet hooks. A nice and simple improvement that site implementers will definitely appreciate!
Refined AVIF image quality defaults
Expect significantly lower AVIF image files at equivalent quality! Wagtail’s current defaults are too high, and we can make more out of having built-in support for this image format.
Keep shaping the roadmap
As always, the roadmap is community‑driven. There are plenty of ways we recommend to keep up with upcoming changes in Wagtail, but we also encourage contributions!
- GitHub issues for concrete feature requests
- GitHub Discussions for early‑stage ideas
- Social media or the Wagtail Slack for quick triage and guidance
And for more regular updates like this, subscribe to the Wagtail newsletter!
