What’s new in Wagtail - May 2025 highlights
Our highlights from What’s New in Wagtail in May 2025
Thank you to everyone who joined us for What’s New in Wagtail! Our webinar recording is now available, and here are a few highlights of what our panelists covered.
State of Wagtail
Thibaud presented key highlights from Wagtail 7.0, notably its status as a long-term support (LTS) release aligned with Django 5.2 LTS, guaranteeing updates and security fixes for 18 months. He highlighted the exciting participation of four contributors through the Google Summer of Code (GSoC) program and recapped the successful DjangoCon Europe event.
Autosave progress
Matthew demonstrated the significant update on Wagtail's path to autosave, allowing editors to save pages as drafts without completing all required fields. This enhances flexibility for editors, enabling incremental content creation and continuous previewing. He noted some developer considerations, such as handling optional fields in templates, or opting into the previous behavior of requiring validation.
A future iteration will be to save drafts in the background, while editors update the content:
For more information on the direction we’re taking and how to help, checkout Our roadmap for collaborative content management.
StreamField and preview improvements
Up next, Sage showcased enhancements in the page editor. StreamField’s new dynamic block previews, drag-and-drop reordering, and customizable live preview panel sizes. We expect these improvements will significantly speed up common content editing tasks.
Sage encouraged community feedback on future UI updates and acknowledged contributions from community members, such as Jordan Teichmann who implemented new pagination components.
Accessibility updates
Thibaud and Sherry presented recent accessibility-focused improvements:
- The new alt text quality check, which is now enabled by default.
- An updated Accessibility Conformance Report – now in sync with the latest changes in Wagtail 7.0.
This new VPAT™ / ACR reporting is particularly relevant in a public sector setting, where this reporting is often part of the procurement process.
We briefly looked at the average accessibility scores of government websites built with Wagtail as a demonstration of the need to meet higher expectations–all those scores are much higher than the corresponding countries’ average scores.
Roadmap highlights
We then reviewed SEO-focused feature sponsorship concepts: SEO power tools. Those new additions to Wagtail are particularly relevant to improve QA of new and existing content. The features also leverage generative AI (in particular internal linking with vector search), to speed up the authoring.
Wagtail.org website
Meagen and Chiemezuo discussed recent updates on wagtail.org, including adopting Wagtail Newsletter and significant improvements to contextual alt text with the new image block built as part of Google Summer of Code. Chiemezuo explained how contextual alt text was improved.
The envisioned interface for contextual alt text would also include suggestions to reuse existing image descriptions, or optionally generate new ones with a LLM.
Community updates
Meagen also shared community highlights from DjangoCon Europe and upcoming events such as PyCon US and DjangoCon US, emphasizing the forthcoming virtual Wagtail Space event! Do checkout our community survey to let us know what kind of Wagtail Space would work best for you.
