Wagtail Wrapped 2025
The year 2025 led to a more polished and AI-ready version of Wagtail
What an incredible year! Honestly, we don't know how we fit all the stuff we accomplished into 2025. From delivering four high-quality releases that we're super proud of to hosting a stellar Wagtail Space to teaming up with new collaborators, we feel like we were constantly flapping our Wagtail wings. Let's check out all the things we did.
2025 by the numbers
In 2025, the Wagtail project had:
- 112 code contributors
- 435 people from 59 countries at our first virtual Wagtail Space since the initial wave of COVID19
- Four major releases, including a leap to a new version number with the 7.0 LTS release
- 1,044 issues closed
- 383 pull requests merged
- 42 new contributors
- A gain of over 1,000 new stars on GitHub
Leaping from Wagtail 6.4 to 7.2
Our first release of the year introduced a lot of user interface improvements designed to make work for editors even easier. The 6.4 release gave editors StreamField block previews and the ability to drag and drop StreamField blocks where they need them to go. This release also included more improvements and resources for headless Wagtail as well as alt text checks in the accessibility checker.
We switched things up a bit for our May release by making it our LTS release for the year. Community members pointed out that with Django putting out their LTS release in April each year, it would make sense for us to line our LTS release up with theirs so that people who prefer LTS releases can upgrade both around the same time if they want to.
Besides that, the big change in the 7.0 release was deferred validation, which is a fancy way of saying now you can leave mandatory fields empty when you save drafts. This was a small, but critical, step on our journey to autosave. This release included a lot of self-care maintenance work as well, but we managed to fit in some assorted small user experience improvements as well, such as a better pagination navigator for jumping to different pages in a listing.
We continued our trend of including small, but mighty, user improvements in Wagtail 7.1. That release gave users the option to switch between grid and list modes in their image galleries. We also gave developers more control over which parts of their custom blocks could be collapsible so they can hide infrequently used settings and make blocks easier for editors to fill out. This release included more improvements for headless users too and some keyboard shortcuts created by one of our Google Summer of Code contributors.
Our final release of the year thoroughly revamped search in Wagtail and made the Wagtail admin even smoother for editors to use. The new validation error shortcut button takes you straight to errors so you can fix them even faster. The readability check feature also provides a useful tool to help editors review and simplify their writing.
Overall, these releases were a balanced combination of moving forward some big roadmap items that aren't as visible (like autosave and making the Wagtail backend more friendly to AI integration) and features that make editors lives a bit easier with each release. This summary hardly does all the things we've done this year justice, so head over to our release notes archive if you want to dig into all the details.
Making Wagtail more AI-ready
The impact of rapidly changing AI technologies on the tech industry in 2025 is undeniably huge. This year, we took some time to think very carefully about how these technologies could be incorporated into the Wagtail and came out with a balanced AI policy that gives Wagtail users more options to use their preferred AI tools without making them a mandatory part of Wagtail.
That's why most of our AI innovations this year were incorporated into the Wagtail AI package instead. While the Wagtail AI package has been around for a few years, the improvements added this year provide even more tools for editors to create AI-generated alt text, image captions, summaries, and more directly from the Wagtail interface. If you missed the demo at Wagtail Space, check it out here or on YouTube.
A stellar Wagtail Space 2025
One of the big highlights of the year for us was Wagtail Space 2025. We were honestly thrilled with the turnout and were pleased to give our global community an opportunity to come together and enjoy some incredible talks. We had so many great talks submitted that we had to create an additional track.
If you haven't had a chance to watch those awesome talks yet, the full Wagtail Space playlist is available now on YouTube.
Our most popular content in 2025
This was our first year flying onto Bluesky as a social media platform and spending time on Mastodon with our fellow open source enthusiasts. While we were able to build decent followings on both of those platforms this year, our biggest sources of growth for Wagtail actually came from YouTube and (believe it or not) LinkedIn. The YouTube numbers were not surprising to us. We've known for a while that there is a lot of potential there. LinkedIn, on the other hand, turned out to be one of our most active and engaged social media channels in 2025.
We had more great blog content again this year. Here are the top 10 posts if you would like to give them a re-read or share them again with all your digital friends:
- uv overtakes Poetry
- uv overtakes PIP in CI
- 10 underrated Django packages
- The 2025 State of Django's top packages
- aria-label is a letdown
- Enjoy better UX with Wagtail 7.1
- Flying into a new era with Wagtail 7.0
- You don’t need to worry about CVE-2025-45388
- Enjoy a smoother content experience with Wagtail 6.4
- Check yourself before you wreck yourself with vibe coding
We did more collaborations with Django in 2025
We love Django, the web framework Wagtail is built on top of, like an older sibling and supporting the Django project is very important to us. This year, we experimented with doing some more cross-promotion with Django and collaborating with the Django Software Foundation at bigger Python events. This coincided with Thibaud Colas, one of our core team members, serving as the Django Software Foundation President.
Thibaud had a very busy schedule this year representing the Django Software Foundation at various events across the globe from DjangoCon Africa to PyCon UK. He helped facilitate opportunities for our communities to collaborate, so that we can see if teaming up would help us connect with more people and get the word out about both communities.
Since Django has been around longer than Wagtail (they just celebrated their 20th birthday this year!), the opportunity for us to team up at bigger Python events like PyConUS was great for both groups. Teaming up definitely helped both of our communities use our resources better and showed us there are definitely more ways we can work together to support each other's growth. The Django Software Foundation also generously supported Wagtail Space 2025. We definitely look forward to doing more with our Django friends in 2026.
We got this far because of collaborations
The Django Software Foundation weren't the only ones who supported us this year. We're grateful to these organizations for supporting us this year
- Torchbox, the creators of Wagtail, our perpetual champions, and an all around awesome group of co-owners promoting positive change in the world
- Lyst, who sponsored the creation of the drag-and-drop block feature for StreamField
- Divio, for providing official support for the Wagtail starter kit
- Google Summer of Code, for supporting the internships that led to our new keyboard shortcut features, improved our image and page listings, moved our Content Security Policy (CSP) compatibility forward, and helped us explore grid-aware website options.
- Code Red, for sponsoring a Wagtail booth with Torchbox at DjangoCon US 2025
- Cursive, for sponsoring Wagtail Space 2025
- Hactar, for sponsoring Wagtail Space 2025
- Six Feet Up, for sponsoring Wagtail Space 2025
- Lincoln Loop, for sponsoring Wagtail Space 2025
- Four Digits, for sponsoring Wagtail Space 2025
- DEFNA, for sponsoring Wagtail Space 2025
Looking ahead to 2026
We've already got some great stuff planned for Wagtail in 2026. If you have a look at our public roadmap, you'll see that we're aiming to have a minimal viable product for autosave in our first release of the year. We're also planning to provide more options for StreamField block settings, create an llms.txt file for our documentation, improve model search, and explore more options for the Wagtail AI package. If there's a feature on the roadmap you really want to see happen ASAP in 2026, please do get in touch with us about sponsoring Wagtail.
That's all for 2025. We're going to give our wings a rest so that we can fly even farther in 2026. We hope you'll come along with us.
Thank you to all of our 2025 contributors
We're going to try something new for the Wagtail Wrapped post this year. We've collected all the code contributor names from our release notes this year so that we can give you all a thank you here as well like we did for our package maintainers in November. We've also manually added some names for folks who made other sorts of contributions this year. We're still sorting out if there is a way to extract the names of our translators from Transifex and add them too. In the mean time though, if you've contributed this year and your name is missing from our list, please let us know!
- Aayushman Singh
- Abigail Hampson
- Aditya (megatrron)
- Agnès Haasser
- Alec Baron
- Alessandro Chitarrini
- Alex Fulcher
- Alex Morega
- Alex Tomkins
- Ali İltizar
- Amir Mahmoodi
- Andrew Hosgood
- Andrew Selzer
- Anees Asghar
- Ankit Kumar
- Annette Lewis
- Antoine Rodriguez
- Andy Babic
- arpitmak
- Arthur Tripp
- Ashish Nagmoti
- Ataf Fazledin Ahamed
- Ayaan Qadri
- Baptiste Mispelon
- Ben Enright
- Bernhard Bliem
- Bojan Mihelac
- Brylie Christopher Oxley
- Charan T M
- Chiemezuo Akujobi
- Chrissy Wainwright
- Clifford Gama
- claudobahn
- Coen van der Kamp
- Cynthia Kiser
- Damilola Oladele
- Dan Braghis
- Daniel Kirkham
- Dawid Bugajewski
- Dhruvi Patel
- Dimaco
- Doug Harris
- Elhussein Almasri
- Ellie Walsh-O'Neill
- Emily Topp-Mugglestone
- Eric Matthes
- Eric Sherman
- Erick Otenyo
- Gaurav Verma
- Gorlik
- Grace Amondi
- Guilhem Saurel
- Harsh Dange
- Heric Libong
- Hunzlah Malik
- Ian Bellchambers
- Ian Meigh
- Ihor Marhitych
- Jake Howard
- James Harrington
- Jai Vignesh J
- Jatin Bhardwaj
- Jigyasu Rajput
- Joel William
- Joey Jurjens
- John-Scott Atlakson
- Jon Chittenden
- Jordan Teichmann
- Joren Hammudoglu
- Joshua Munn
- Karl Hobley
- Krystian Magdziarz
- Laura Wissiak
- Lasse Schmieding
- LB Johnston
- Lisa Ballam
- Lily Veale
- Lucie Laporte
- Lynwee
- Maciej Baron
- Mahmoud Nasser
- manu
- Mariana Bedran Lesche
- Matt Westcott
- Mauro Soche
- Meagen Voss
- Michael Trythall
- minusf
- M. Sumair Khokhar
- Mohamed Rabiaa
- Mohammad Fathi Rahman
- Mustopha Mubarak O
- Naomi Morduch Toubman
- Nick Smith
- Noah van der Meer
- Oliver Parker
- Paul Craciunoiu
- Pawel Masarczyk
- Prabhpreet Kaur
- Pravin Kamble
- Rahul Samant
- Rachel Smith
- Ramon de Jezus
- Richard Allen
- Rishabh Sharma
- Rohit Sharma
- Sævar Öfjörð Magnússon
- Sage Abdullah
- Sai Srikar Dumpeti
- Scott Cranfill
- Seb Corbin
- Sébastien Corbin
- Shlomo Markowitz
- Shiv
- Shivam Kumar
- Srishti Jaiswal
- Stefan Hammer
- Stéphane Blondon
- Storm Heg
- Strapchay
- Sylvain Boissel
- Sylvain Fankhauser
- Talha Rizwan
- Temidayo Azeez
- Thibaud Colas
- Tom Dyson
- Tom Usher
- Tosinibikunle
- Trish Thomas
- Unyime Emmanuel Udoh
- Vince Salvino
- Vishesh Garg
- Yousef Al-Hadhrami (Yemeni)
- Ziyao Yan
