Get even more organized with Wagtail 6.1
Make all the organizers in your life happy with the newest content-wrangling tools from Wagtail 6.1
Trying to stay organized when you publish a lot of content can feel like trying to contain a pool that's overflowing. You've got files all over the place and finding things is so hard that you just upload new things. You tell yourself you'll clean it up later because you have deadlines right now. And then you never get around to cleaning up because you have even more deadlines. Sound familiar?
Well, this Wagtail release has a few more things to help you sort and search for the items you need. Our latest version will help you spend less time hunting around and more time focusing on your content. Here are all the great things you can do with Wagtail 6.1:
Search and filter more items with Universal listings
In Wagtail 6.0, we made our new Universal listing experience available for Pages, Snippets, and Forms that made it easier for editors to search and filter these items. In Wagtail 6.1, you can use the new search and filter functions for images, documents, collections, form responses, site and locale listings, groups, users, and workflows.
These new views make it easier for editors to sort items and build their own collections so items can be located more quickly and reused. For example, say you have a team of people collaborating on a website about ducks called Quacktacular. Instead of uploading the Quacktacular logo file several times because no one ever wants to sort through a bunch of photos to find the original, you can create a "Quacktacular Branding" collection or add a "logo" tag to your images. That way, all the duck enthusiasts helping you out can quickly filter down the whole image library to the files they need.
With tools like that, editors can spend less time tearing their hair out trying to find files and more time writing about things they really care about (like ducks or wagtails 🐦).
Fit more on your editing page with Snug mode
When working on content, some people love to spread out. Their desks are buried in chaotic piles of papers, snacks, books, and other random doodads that inspire their writing. Other people prefer to keep things more contained. These are the people who have trays for their post-it notes, a coaster for their stapler, and sort their paperclips by color.
Wagtail 6.1 has a new admin setting for the page editor that can make both sorts of folks happy. With the Information-dense admin interface, aka "Snug mode", you can choose to have a more spread out page editor or a condensed version. This mode will be particularly useful for people who work on really long pages because it will help you pack more information onto your screen and reduce scrolling.
To switch Snug mode on, go to your Account settings and under Theme Preferences change your Density preference from "Default" to "Snug".
Create custom listings with PageListingViewSet
When a little content is organized in a page tree, it's generally not too hard to find the pages you need. When a lot of content is organized in a page tree, it can feel more like your trying to find a single leaf in a page forest.
That's why in this release, we created the PageListingViewSet class. With this handy class, you can create a custom list of all pages with a given page type. Say those folks working on the Quacktacular website had a special page type for duck profiles (because each duck deserves it's time in the spotlight, right?). Then you can customize PageListingViewSet to create a menu item in the toolbar called "Duck profiles" that includes a list of all pages that have the duck profile page type.
That way, you can collect all the duck profiles in one place even if they are child pages that are two levels deep in the page tree or two hundred levels deep in the page tree. (We sincerely hope no one out there has a page tree that is two hundred levels deep. That would be a ludicrous amount of content. If you do though, definitely tell us about it!)
Remove the password option from private pages or collections
When you're working with secure content or extremely sensitive content, providing access to that content with a shared password isn't always a good idea. To give people more options for hardening their security and protecting their content, Wagtail 6.1 offers the option to disabled shared passwords on private pages and document collections. That way, only admin users and the people who created the private pages or collections will have access to them. This approach can make your secure content a bit more difficult to share internally or externally but also offers more protection from insider attacks and other threats.
Find handy keyboard shortcuts
Whether you write code or write words for a living, keyboard shortcuts are super useful. They aren't the easiest things to remember though, so this Wagtail release includes a new dialog in our Help menu that you can use to remind yourself what shortcuts are available. If you've never given Wagtail keyboard navigation a go, pop the menu open and give it a try. You never know when you might need it!
A few upgrade considerations
There aren't any major breaking changes like there were in the last release, but there are still a few things you need watch out for as you get your upgrade rolling. There are changes related to the classes that are used in the new Universal listing views as well as a hook signature change and a small collection of deprecations and variable name changes. Be sure to read the release notes to get all the critical details.
