Wagtail Wrapped 2024
Wagtail flew through 2024 and came out with more fantastic features
Wagtail turned 10 years old this year! Reaching double digits didn't slow us down at all though. From concurrent editing features to major migration performance improvements to a new dashboard look, a lot happened for the Wagtail project in 2024. This year was a busy one, so let's take a look at the highlights and celebrate all the incredible things that happened this year.
2024 by the numbers
This year the Wagtail project:
- Had 4 major releases, including our most recent LTS release, 6.3, in November
- Had 67 new contributors to the Wagtail project
- Merged over 400 pull requests
- Closed over 400 issues
- Acquired nearly 2,000 new stars on GitHub
- Held two Wagtail Space events in the United States and the Netherlands
- Guided four interns through Outreachy and Google Summer of Code
Let's see what came out of all that hard work in our major releases this year.
Going from Wagtail 6.0 to 6.3
The version number leap appears smaller this year, but all that means is that our newest versions didn't have any major breaking changes. There were still lots of new features and tools we introduced to make managing and creating your content even smoother.
Wagtail 6.0 made it easier to filter down your content according to specific page types, authors, and other categories. This release also made our built-in accessibility checker available directly in the editor so you don't have to switch between windows to fix accessibility issues. The updates ultimately made it easier to manage large amounts of content and find what you need.
Continuing with our focus on organization, we gave users more options to organize content the way they wanted to in Wagtail 6.1. With our new snug mode feature, users have the option to squish more items together on the page if they wanted to. We introduced a new feature for creating custom listings as well so that people could pull together groups of pages across their whole project into a single, more convenient view.
Editors who work on teams got a real treat in Wagtail 6.2 when we introduced concurrent editing notifications. It used to be much easier to accidentally overwrite another person's changes when two people were working on the same piece of content. Now when multiple people are working on the same piece of content, they'll receive notifications to help prevent saving over another person's work. This release included one of our biggest performance improvements of the year as well with a change that reduced the memory usage for processing the migration files of a brand new Wagtail project by 95%.
Our final release of the year, Wagtail 6.3, brought along one of our biggest accessibility improvements of 2024. Our new ImageBlock option, which was created by Chiemezuo Akujobi and his mentors for Google Summer of Code, makes it MUCH easier to create truly useful alt text for images. Our final release also debuted a new look for the main dashboard with a more prominent search bar.
We've barely scratched the surface on all of the great things our core team and contributors created this year. So if you want the full details, please head over to our release notes archive for a deeper dive into this year's releases.
Another year, another push to make Wagtail more accessible and sustainable
This year, we continued to focus on supporting best practices that help our users make their Wagtail projects more accessible and sustainable.
Here are just a few things we did this year to make Wagtail more accessible:
- Expanded the standard set of default checks that come with the Wagtail accessibility checker
- Made the accessibility checker available in the Wagtail editor
- Provided better support for right-to-left languages in our designs
- Made a list of keyboard shortcuts available
- Added a high contrast theme that can be set in a user's account settings
- Added a new ImageBlock feature that makes it easier to provide contextual alt text and mark images as decorative for screenreader users
- Completed an accessibility audit of Wagtail.org with Outreachy intern Shakhrizoda Yusupova
- Investigated ways to improve our accessibility docs with Outreachy intern Ahmed Olaitan
On top of making these changes, Scott Cranfill and Meagen Voss on the core team also made an effort to get out the word about how you can use Wagtail to build more accessible websites by teaching workshops online and at in-person events like PyCon US.
For sustainability, this year we have largely focused on Wagtail performance improvements (like the change that reduced the amount of memory used for migration files by 95% for a new project) as well as expanding our work with collaborators like the Green Web Foundation. Core team member Thibaud Colas has joined the technical advisory group for the grid-aware websites project along with representatives from WordPress, Drupal, and other open source web technologies. Thibaud also continued his work measuring the environmental impact of Wagtail and Django websites and shared alot of his results at a talk at DjangoCon US.
Making it easier to try Wagtail
We worked this year on making Wagtail easier for people to try out. While the Wagtail Bakery demo is a much-beloved test project with lots of yummy bread pictures in it, we saw too often that people were using it to start new projects and struggling because it wasn't designed for that.
The ability to load specific templates for Wagtail projects has been a feature for a few releases now but we started making people more aware of how they could load their own templates. We also created an official starter template, sponsored by Torchbox, that includes some test data and a fully functional frontend as well as some settings for deploying that site directly to Fly.io. Now you can have a working Wagtail website up live on the Internet in a matter of minutes. Because it's meant to be customized, it also contains a lot of the things you need for a new website like menus and blocks and even a dark mode theme.
If you haven't tried out the starter kit yet, you should really give it a go and share it with all your friends. 😉
Leveling up our package options
We didn't just focus on Wagtail itself this year. We also focused on advancing some new innovation for Wagtail packages as well. The Wagtail AI and Wagtail Vector index packages, for example, were adopted by The Royal National Institute for the Blind to improve their service delivery. The Museum of London also adopted these packages to help providea better experience for people searching their extensive collections. A lot of people are still figuring ethical and useful ways to incorporate AI into their workflows, and these packages provide optional pathways for organizations to experiment with AI in Wagtail.
Another major package innovation we introduced this year was the Wagtail Newsletter package, which was sponsored by The Freedom of the Press Foundation. Concerned about the sudden upheavals in the social media landscape, the Freedom of the Press Foundation wanted to be able to publish newsletters directly from their Wagtail website so they could stay in regular contact with their supporters despite the changes happening in social media. This package gives people the option to send out newsletters to subscribers through a combination of Wagtail and MailChimp. We hope that this package will ultimately evolve to include other email service providers as well. If you're willing to sponsor the addition of your favorite provider, please reach out.
Gathering the community at Wagtail Space and beyond
We had two fantastic Wagtail Space events this year in the Netherlands and in the United States.
Four Digits hosted Wagtail Space Netherlands in Arnhem, which included two days of sprints and one day of talks. Folks came together to work different issues and projects related to Wagtail during the sprints. Then, during the talk day, they covered topics ranging from passkeys to caching to headless Wagtail and more. You can find all the talks available on YouTube if you want to catch up on some amazing content.
The Wharton School of Business shared their library with us for Wagtail Space US in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Even though a heat dome formed over the event and tried to bake our feathers, everyone had a great time getting together for two days of talks and one day of sprints. We had speakers share their experiences making big fixes in legacy websites, give us a crash course on content mapping, and delve into ways to effectively use Wagtail with AI. Those talks are also available on YouTube if you'd like to queue up the playlist.
Community members also got together at a lot of other conferences this year, including PyCon US, DjangoCon Europe, DjangoCon US, FOSDEM, and more. We love it when Wagtailers flock together.
Expanding our reach to new social spaces and more
We adapted to the changing social media landscape by switching our focus to newer platforms. We continued promoting Wagtail on LinkedIn and Mastodon while also following the momentum and starting up an account on Bluesky. We also participated in wider communities through the Django Discord community, the WagtailCMS subreddit, and more.
We had a lot of great blogs on the website this year as well. Here are the top 10 most-viewed blogs from this year as of this writing:
- 10 years of Wagtail
- Introducing the Wagtail Starter Kit
- Find what you need faster in Wagtail 6.0
- How to use Wagtail within a MACH Architecture
- Content metrics, concurrent editing, and more in Wagtail 6.2
- Recovering deleted Wagtail pages and Django models
- Building a Wagtail Starter Template
- Get even more organized with Wagtail 6.1
- DjangoCon Europe 2024 bird’s-eye view
- A new tutorial series for the new year
Collaborations took us far this year
Without our sponsors and contributors, we would never have been able to deliver all the improvements and new features that we provided this year. Our supporters this year included:
- Torchbox, the creators of Wagtail and perpetual champions for this community
- The Mozilla Foundation, who supported the creation of the Page types report
- The Motley Fool, who sponsored the addition of content metrics to the editor
- The Freedom of the Press Foundation, who sponsored the Wagtail Newsletter package
- Google Season of Docs for supporting our new advanced tutorial series
- Google Season of Code for supporting the internship that led to new ImageBlock accessibility feature
- Four Digits, for hosting Wagtail Space Netherlands
- The Wharton School of Business for hosting Wagtail Space US
- DEFNA for sponsoring Wagtail Space US
- 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
Looking forward to 2025
The year 2024 had a lot of great things in it but 2025 has even more potential. If you have a look at our Wagtail Roadmap, you can see that we're doing a lot of great new things with StreamField blocks that will make the experience for content creators even better.
Editors love StreamField blocks, but often find themselves wishing they could drag blocks from one part of the page to another without having to click arrows so many times. So we plan to add drag and drop to StreamField blocks. When you have a lot of blocks to choose from, it can also be hard to remember what blocks look like. StreamField block previews will remove the guessing and help editors make quicker decisions about which blocks they want to use. We're conducting a developer poll right now on that feature if you have opinions on how we make it happen.
We're also continuing to lay the groundwork for larger features (like autosave), performance improvements, and improvements to the headless Wagtail experience. Sponsorships help us make the work for these larger improvements go faster. If you'd love to see any of these features happen ASAP or know someone who does, please reach out and get in touch with us about sponsoring Wagtail.
That's it for 2024. It's been quite a packed year. We're looking forward to having a little break and then flying back into the new year to take Wagtail to new heights. We hope you'll join us!
