Wagtailers flocked to Scotland for DjangoCon Europe 2023
A great week for Wagtailers in Edinburgh
A whole flock of Wagtail community members gathered in Edinburgh, Scotland for the 2023 DjangoCon Europe conference. There were some familiar faces from our core team as well as plenty of new folks who were interested in learning about our favourite Python-powered CMS.
One of the biggest Wagtail highlights of the conference was the workshop Best of both worlds: Next.js ❤️ Wagtail presented by core team members Thibaud Colas and Sage Adullah of Torchbox. They had a packed room with 55 people who came out to give Wagtail a go. You can give the workshop a go too if you want because Thibaud and Sage have shared it on GitHub.
Another high-flying moment for Wagtail came when Dawn Wages from Microsoft featured our community in her keynote talk: A New Adventure Is Born: How Open Source Dinos Unite.
Since it's rumored that dinosaurs ultimately became birds, we totally support this talk theme!
Other talks we were excited about included a daring exploration of using SQLite in production from Tom Dyson and a talk on Django accessibility by Lauren Parsons that featured some examples of her work on Wagtail for the Royal National Institute of Blind People. Core team member Sage Abdullah also presented somewhat silly lightning talk in which he shared his discovery of a small blip in the letter "g" of the Django logo that apparently has been there since before Django was officially released. Sage reports the audience was divided 50:50 on whether or not to submit a fix.
In the exhibit ballroom, which had some of the fanciest chandeliers we ever did see, Ian Bellchambers and Matthew Westcott met Wagtail fans at a fabulous Wagtail booth sponsored by Torchbox. They handed out stickers and answered questions. Rumor was there was a drawing for some hard-to-come-by Wagtail swag too.
No DjangoCon is complete without sprints! A small group of Wagtailers joined some of our core team members to make their very first contributions to the Wagtail project. One of our favourites was a contribution from vonlu3, who made their very first GitHub PR that ironically fixed an an error in our documentation on making your first Wagtail contribution.
Thank you to everyone who connected with us at DjangoCon Europe. We're definitely looking forward to seeing folks again in Spain next year, and spending time with our US community members at DjangoCon US later this year.
Don't miss your chance to hang out with other Wagtailers, sign up below to make sure you get our latest event news! ✉️
This Week in Wagtail
A weeklyish newsletter with Wagtail tips, news, and more.