Enjoy a smoother content experience with Wagtail 6.4
Our newest features help you create and organize quality content even faster
A lot of what drives the Wagtail project is our focus on helping everybody on a content team do their best work. We understand that teams have people who tend to wear a lot of different hats and do different things. That's why we often go behind focusing on the process of creating new content and think about what it takes to maintain content over time. Content creators, for example, are often also content updaters and they need tools that can help them save time when updating content just as much as they need tools for creating new content. Similarly, developers aren't just code creators, they are code maintainers and they need things to help that maintenance go smoothly.
As usual, there's a little bit of something for everybody in this release. So, let's dig in and see the great stuff you can do with Wagtail 6.4:
Preview your blocks with StreamField previews
There can be too much of a good thing, and that's true for StreamField blocks just as much as it is for anything else. When you have a lot of blocks to choose from, it can be easy to forget what they look like. Unless you're blessed with an eidetic memory, you'll often wind up wasting time adding and deleting blocks until you find the one you really need. The new block preview feature makes it easy for you to select a block and see what it looks like before you add it to your page. Now you can pick blocks with confidence and build your pages even faster.
Drag and drop your blocks
When you're updating content, you often have to make the same updates in multiple places. You can duplicate StreamField blocks in Wagtail, which is super handy. When you have long pages with lots of content though, moving blocks around with up and down arrows can feel a bit like an elevator that's stopping on every floor. With our new support for drag and drop blocks, now you can drag blocks right to where you need them without clicking arrows over and over again. You can still use the arrows if you miss them though. They aren't going anywhere.
We're so grateful to Lyst for sponsoring this feature so we could add it to Wagtail core and share it with everyone.
Customize your Wagtail background tasks to optimize performance
The newest version of Wagtail incorporates the django-tasks library. This library can help improve Wagtail's performance by giving you the option to move resource-heavy tasks out of the request-response cycle that occurs when a page loads. By default, tasks like updating the search index or calculating image focal points, are executed immediately. Now you can set certain tasks to run as background processes instead through the database or through another backend setting.
Streamline your code with our new panel shorthands
The only thing developers love more than writing code is figuring out how to write less code. This release will definitely scratch your itch to deliver DRY code (or AHA code or WET code or KISS code — whatever acronym makes you happy). Because now you can just use the names of your model fields to indicate that you would like to included them in a FieldPanel or an InlinePanel on the page. With all the keystrokes you save, you could write a new page model or a handy Snippet or a social media poem about your favorite cheese. Whatever makes you happy!
Optimize your alt text
In the last release, we introduced the new ImageBlock with default features to make creating great alt text easier to do. We built on that in this release to make it a bit easier for editors to transition their existing content. Previously, if you updated your code to use the new ImageBlock, editors would have been forced to update all of the blank alt text fields before they would be allowed to save their content. If you're working on a brand new page, then there's no problem. But if you're updating an existing page with lots and lots of images, you might not be thrilled about suddenly needing to write a pile of image captions before you can publish your page.
In this release, the current default alt text is used to automatically fill in the new alt text field so editors can take their time updating the alt text. If they need reminders to update that text, well our latest update to the Wagtail Accessibility Checker will do just that. In Wagtail 6.4, the alt text quality is now checked by default and common alt text issues will be flagged by the checker. So if you have alt text captions like "IMG_5252" or "untitled.jpg", the checker will help you root them out and give people who use screen readers a much better experience.
Get more resources for going headless
As a part of our effort to provide better support for headless Wagtail projects, we have added a Headless Resources page to our documentation. This page provides you with information about how to build a headless project as well as information about the common challenges and limitations you might encounter during that project. This a great page to read if you're considering the pros and cons of the headless approach.
New settings recommendations and other upgrade considerations
As usual, there are a few things to keep in mind while you upgrade. One key thing to note is that as of this release, we're recommending you set the DATA_UPLOAD_MAX_NUMBER_FIELDS setting to 10,000 or higher. There are also some changes that may affect your customizations and the organization of your background tasks. You can explore all the upgrade details in the full release notes.
