What will Wagtail look like in 2023?
We’ve been doing some work on our vision for Wagtail for the next two years. It’s still a work in progress but we feel it’s a good time to share it and get feedback from the wider Wagtail community.
Why do we need a vision?
When a team is excited about a product vision and everyone is bought into it, you can make so much more happen. Even if you don’t fully deliver on the vision, you’ll get closer than you would have done without it.
A shared vision will help to make our product development more purposeful and strategic. We’ll achieve more in the areas that matter and focus less on areas that don’t, and it can help us to plan out the dependencies in the work we need to do now in order to achieve our bigger goals.
What are the time scales?
We’re working on a two year timescale, focusing on what we think will be achievable by 2023. Therefore, there is nothing out of this world, no VR headset integrations, but just enough to simultaneously scare and inspire; scared about the scale of the work, but inspired about the destination.
Can we see it?
Yes you can. There are lots of different ways that a product vision could be presented such as videos or playbooks, we’ve chosen to use a comic strip. This format allows us to tell powerful stories that resonate with people, without needing to be too specific. We’ve separated the vision into five key areas, or pillars.
Wagtail 2023
Here is what we hope it will be like using Wagtail in 2023 - view The Vision. And here is a transcript of the contents as text.
Editors, get your best work done
Instantly feel at home to unleash your creativity and create your best content. Let Wagtail help you optimise the content for success and keep you up to date on content performance.
Comic panels
- Our writer logs into Wagtail for the first time. It’s a great onboarding experience.
- Creating a page is so smooth. The interface feels less like a web form and more like an app. It feels totally natural.
- As she gains experience, she realises how well-thought-out Wagtail is for both simple, short pages and long, complex pages.
- Wagtail helps her with quality from checking her writing against legibility criteria and brand guidelines, to SEO, to simulating previews on mobile and tablet.
- Replace balcony with mezzanine for better SEO
- When she submits a page for review she likes how she always knows where it is in the workflow.
First thirty minutes of Wagtail
We want the initial experience with Wagtail to be the best it can be: a great demo experience, a smooth set-up process, easy onboarding, great documentation…
Comic panels
- Lars is looking for a new CMS to use for his agency clients. Wagtail has great reviews so he visits wagtail.io and jumps straight into the online demo.
- The onboarding is so slick that within minutes he’s straight into the editor experience road-testing StreamField.
- Use this button to add StreamField blocks
- He one-click installs Wagtail and follows the development tutorial. He’s blown away by the developer experience and how simple it is to build pages and models, and the default FE templates give him the end-to-end experience.
- Open the content type and drag and drop new fields.
- 30 minutes later he’s convinced that Wagtail offers his clients a great editing experience, and his developers a fast way to build high quality sites.
- The icing on the cake is the availability of sales material for him, not only to convince his team, but also to help him in pitches.
Multi-channel experiences
Wagtail is 100% API enabled to give you ultimate flexibility when it comes to managing content across all of your channels.
Comic panels
- Sam reviews bikes on his website, on Amazon Alexa and on Bikezone. He’s just finished testing the Shand Stoater and is ready to do his review.
- He logs into Wagtail and creates a new review. He starts with the core content, stuff like the title, that is shared across all platforms, next comes the platform specific content…
- The long form content for his website (and Bikezone), the shorter Alexa Skills briefing and the video and audio versions too.
- Finally he checks the meta-data for the Bikezone API and he publishes to all channels at once.
- Creating and editing content is so much simpler now it’s all in one place. More time to go out riding.
Sophistication, without compromising simplicity
Wagtail reveals the power of its features as you need them, making it easy for simple sites and a powerhouse for the most complex.
Comic panels
- Shree built her film club website on Wagtail; it was a breeze with the starter pack. Now others post the film reviews. It’s easy, they didn’t even need training.
- In the docs, Shree read about Wagtail’s powerful feature set, features the film club website might never need but features that would make her day job easier.
- Wagtail Localise ENGLISH → FRANÇAIS
- So Shree took Wagtail to her boss. She works in a government department where the CMS is slow and frustrating.
- Wagtail Workflows Step 3: Editor review → Step 4: Approve & Publish
- The team prototyped and tested Wagtail for scale, speed and features including the custom workflow and translations.
- The dev team love it and the wider editorial team can’t get enough of the edit tools and dashboard – it’s an easy swap-in for their current system.
Wagtail as a Platform
We’re obsessed with making Wagtail easy to build, maintain and customise. Speed of development is crucial for our community.
Comic panels & quotes
- “I love how flexible and reusable content is in Wagtail. I can enable powerful features, like workflow or revisions, just with a few lines of code.”
- “The Admin API gives me certainty about the right way to automate basic actions, like publishing a page. The risk that a new upgrade will break my customisations has vanished.”
- “Following the docs it only took me one hour to integrate page notifications with our company Slack!”
- “Changing the admin interface from defined components is so simple now. It gives me the confidence to customise to our needs, knowing my changes will be supported going forwards.”
- “I rebuilt wagtail-media in 10 lines of code. No template code in there at all.”
- “We’re able to build complex core features twice as fast as we could back in 2020.”