Wagtail Wrapped 2023
Wagtail has emerged from 2023 leaner, greener, and more accessible
It's hard to believe that at the very beginning of this year, Wagtail didn't have an accessibility checker or dark mode or many of the new features we have all come to love. All those things, and more, happened in 2023. There's truly so much for us as a community to be proud of. So let's look back on the year and look at all the great things we have done.
2023 by the numbers
This year, the Wagtail project:
- Acquired 2,700 new stars in GitHub
- Had 90 first-time contributors to the Wagtail project
- Closed over 500 issues
- Merged over 600 pull requests
- Saw the online Slack community grow to over 6K members
- Had 4 major releases with over 670 changelog entries
Let's dig in a bit and have a closer look at our major releases for the year.
We went from Wagtail 4.2 to 5.2
Our first release of the year, Wagtail 4.2, had a lot to love in it. One of our favorite new tools by far though, was the new built-in accessibility checker, which Albina Starykova created as a part of her Outreachy internship. That release also gave people more options for optimizing their workspace in the Wagtail editor with resizable panels and a toolbar that could be pinned in place.
In our April release, we made the leap to 5.0 with updates that removed a lot of technical debt. With the move to 5.0, Wagtail also came over to the dark side with dark mode for the editor, SVG support, new enhancements for the accessibility checker, and many other useful changes.
The August release incorporated AVIF support, which was one of the key green features our Google Summer of Code contributors created this year as part of a collaboration with the Green Web Foundation. The release also included many performance improvements that were made by adjusting how Wagtail handles permissions.
Our final release of the year in November incorporated some more green features that give Wagtail users options for making their image management more sustainable. There was also a redesigned page listing and a new action menu to help people curate and organize their content more efficiently.
There were definitely some key themes in our releases throughout the year. Here are some of the areas where we advanced our goals.
These summaries don't even begin to cover all the useful new documentation, developer tools, and small contributions that make Wagtail even more of a delight for people to use. You can visit our release notes archive if you want to go beyond the highlights and relive all the details of 2023 releases.
We made accessibility a big priority
There are two major areas we focused on in 2023: making the Wagtail admin more accessible and creating tools to help people make their content more accessible.
The things we did this year to make the Wagtail admin more accessible included:
- Creating a dark theme for Wagtail
- Changing menu patterns and other parts of the admin so the experience would be better for users of voice recognition software
- Creating more accessible menus
- Making more accessible tooltips and labels to help users navigate the admin
- We completed our first-ever ATAG 2.0 audit
We wanted to go beyond making the Wagtail admin more accessible though because it's important for us to encourage everyone to follow best practices for accessibility from the developers who write the code to the content creators who write the copy. That led to the accessibility checker, which we added more rules to throughout the year. This checker helps editors spot and correct accessibility issues in their content. It can also be customized to catch code issues as well.
Thibaud Colas summarized our accessibility achievements for the year in more detail if you want to learn more about what our accessibility team has been up to.
We took steps to make Wagtail more sustainable
Increasing awareness of the carbon cost of software and websites is something we're pursuing as a part of our commitment to reduce the environmental impact of Wagtail. Before we could make decisions about how to make Wagtail more sustainable though, we spent part of this year deciding how to estimate the emissions of Wagtail websites.
With that in mind, we collaborated with the Green Web Foundation to pursue two sustainability projects sponsored by Google Summer of Code. Our contributors for those projects focused on creating tools for managing images more sustainably, since images affect website efficiency and emissions a lot. Thanks to those contributors, we now have AVIF image support and new image tags to help display images in a more sustainable way.
Those sustainability efforts are only the beginning. We have a sustainability roadmap if you want to see more of the goals we plan to pursue.
We made the admin even more customizable
We know it's important for content creators to have more control over their workspace and content. So we gave developers even more tools to customize the experience for their editors. On top of adding the dark mode option, we also gave developers a way to add custom SVG icons and to customize the theme in the Wagtail admin through CSS custom properties. We also added support for custom validation in Wagtail StreamField, created MulitpleChooserPanel for more chooser panel options, and documented ways developers can add add attritubutes to all panels as well as custom JavaScript using Stimulus.
We provided more tools to help people find what they need
Finding things is a common challenge for many content teams as their libraries get bigger over time. So we dedicated some time this year to enhancing the search options you can use in Wagtail projects. We added support for querying boosting in Elasticsearch. We also added support for Elasticsearch 8 and OpenSearch as well as support for including external links in promoted search results.
Another way we decided to help people find what they need was to redesign the page listings in the 5.2 release. The new searchable page listing design fits more items on each page, which will help people sort through larger amounts of content more quickly.
We made continuous improvements to the content creation experience
The Wagtail page editor has evolved a lot recently. We continued that evolution this year by making some key changes to improve the content creation experience. Editors now have the option to pin the formatting tool bar in place if they want to keep it open. We also adjusted the minimap so that it's "always on" and doesn't randomly pop open anymore. We also improved the "/" command shortcut and the block picker so that users have to do less scrolling when they choose blocks in StreamField. We updated the actions menu in page listings too so that it's more accessible and content creators can access the options they need a bit quicker.
We took Snippets to the next level
It became clear to us throughout the year that snippets had a bigger role to play within Wagtail. That's why we ultimately made the decision to replace wagtail.contrib.modeladmin with wagtail.snippets. We also introduced new workflow options for snippets so that creators can included approval steps and other options for snippet content. Snippets can also be locked now to prevent unwanted editing. Snippets are amazingly flexible. Considering how much progress we made with them in 2023, we're excited to see what we can do with them next in 2024.
We brought together Wagtailers from around the world
A lot of the coding progress we made this year was boosted by the new connections we made with each other in person. We had Wagtailers representing our community at numerous events this year. Our first really big gathering was at DjangoCon EU in Edinburgh, Scotland in May.
Then we had another large group of Wagtailers come together later on in October at DjangoCon US in Durham, North Carolina.
We've also seen more people flocking together in our online Slack community throughout the year. Overall, it's been a very good year for connecting Wagtailers to each other in person, and we're looking forward to doing more.
We got the word out in more ways than ever
Our social media was a lot more active this year as we expanded our community's social media reach by joining Mastodon. We also officially launched the Wagtail CMS LinkedIn page.
Our blog was a lot more active this year too. There were definitely a lot of good things to talk about! Here are the top 10 most-viewed posts from this year:
- Wagtail 5.1 gets a bit greener and leaner
- How and why the Wagtail page editor is evolving
- How we added SVG support to Wagtail 5.0
- Estimating Wagtail websites’ emissions
- Curate content better and make it greener in Wagtail 5.2
- Introducing Wagtail's new accessibility checker
- Introducing the Wagtail Roadmap
- Results of the 2023 Wagtail Deployment Survey
- Permissions and performance improvements in Wagtail 5.1
- How to pick a good Wagtail package
We had great collaborations with supporters
Our 2023 would not have been nearly as successful as it was without the generous support of our sponsors, collaborators, and contributors. Our supporters this year included:
- Torchbox, the creators of Wagtail and perpetual champions for this community
- YouGov, who supported the addition of SVG image support and multiple chooser panels
- Google, who funded our Google Summer of Code projects, and our Google Season of Docs project to improve the Wagtail tutorials
- Outreachy, who supported the internship that led to the creation of the accessibility checker
- The Green Web Foundation, who provided resources and mentoring for our sustainability projects
- CodeRed, for co-sponsoring a booth at DjangoCon US and supporting our growing community in the United States
- Four Digits, for creating Wagtail Space and for helping us bring Wagtail Space back in 2024
- Our core team, who steer Wagtail's development and provide technical mentorship to newer community members
- Our community contributors, who have made so many contributions large and small that have made Wagtail what it is today
Thank you so much for helping make all these wonderful things happen!
We're stoked for 2024
As exciting as 2023 was, there's plenty more we're looking forward to in 2024. As you can see on our Wagtail Roadmap, we've got some exciting plans for Wagtail on the horizon. In our 6.0 release (yes, 6.0!), we're looking to move the accessibility checker into the page editor, add right-to-left language support, and make navigating large amounts of content even easier with changes to universal listings. In upcoming releases, we're also laying the groundwork for exciting big new features like auto-save and enhancing the dashboard.
If that wasn't enough to be thrilled about, we're officially launching some new tutorials in our next release that were created through the support of Google Season of Docs. We can't wait to see what you think of them.
Of course, some of the most exciting news for 2024, is the return of Wagtail Space! Wagtail Space NL will be hosted at Four Digits and will be held in Arnhem, The Netherlands on June 12-14. Wagtail Space US will be hosted at The Wharton School in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on June 20-22.
The year 2024 is also special because Wagtail is turning 10! We look forward to celebrating this anniversary with you and continuing to grow the community around this fantastic CMS we all love.
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