Feature index
All the things that help you do awesome things
Accessibility
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Dark mode
Users who struggle with light sensitivity, eye strain, and other visual conditions benefit from the higher contrast that dark mode provides. Dark mode also uses less energy on OLED screens, which makes it a plus for the planet too.
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Keyboard shortcuts
Wagtail provides custom keyboard shortcuts and a slash command to make common functions quicker and easier for keyboard users to access.
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Accessibility checker
The built-in Wagtail accessibility checker flags likely accessibility issues in content. The checker is customizable so you can go beyond the default rules and set up standards specific to your code and your organization.
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Contextual alt text support
Wagtail encourages better alt text practices right away by including options to mark images as decorative and to customize alt text according to the context of your content. The original image descriptions are also included by default to make sure editors don't leave alt text blank by accident.
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Alt text checks
The Wagtail accessibility checker flags common issues with alt text descriptions, such as using file names or leaving underscores in the text.
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Enhanced admin contrast
If you need higher contrast to work more comfortably and effectively, Wagtail provides low contrast and high contrast versions of the Wagtail admin in both the light and dark themes.
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Windows High Contrast Mode support
In addition to being able to adjust the contrast within the Wagtail admin, Wagtail is compatible with Windows High Contrast mode.
Editing
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Preview
Contributors to your site don’t need to publish their content to be able to view what they’ve created. Clicking on preview will generate a representation of the page for them giving the contributor the chance to tweak and change the content before publishing it to the world.
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Tables
Tables are difficult to use within normal WYSIWYG rich-text editors. In Wagtail you can use a table block within StreamField to allow your users to neatly enter tabulated information in an intuitive, easy-to-use spreadsheet-style interface.
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StreamField Blocks
With Wagtail StreamField, editors can mix and match content from a custom collection of blocks to build content the way they want to. Developers can tailor blocks specifically to editors needs and structure data in ways that work best for their backend operations. Using blocks also provides precise design control over the look, feel, and branding of the content.
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Revisions
While revisions are never going to win the prize for most interesting feature they’re pretty essential to any content workflow strategy. This allows content producers, editors and managers the peace of mind that their content is version managed and that they can always go back in time to retrieve the version they need.
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Image cropping and upload
Wagtail implements smart facial recognition and helpful image cropping to try and ensure your images always look amazing. We used the OpenCV library to build feature detection into the image upload process: when you upload an image Wagtail detects gestures and faces (single or multiple) and stores their coordinates.
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Content metrics
Wagtail comes standard with reading time, readability, and word count metrics. Using the check panels, you can get a sense of whether your content is too long or complex.
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Comments
You can provide feedback on content directly in Wagtail using the Wagtail commenting system. Combined with Wagtail's enterprise workflow features, you can set up entire editorial workflows inside Wagtail without having to pass around other documents.
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Minimap
You can jump quickly to the parts of pages you need to edit with the Wagtail minimap. The collapsible minimap makes it easy for you to find the content you need to work on and find errors that need to be fixed.
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Private pages
You can change who accesses a particular page with Wagtail's page privacy settings. You can attach a password to a page, make pages accessible to logged in users only, or make your private page accessible to only certain groups of users.
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StreamField Block Previews
Editors love StreamField blocks, but can't always remember what each block type looks like. StreamField block previews provide quick visual reminders of block structures so editors can design their pages more quickly and with confidence.
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Compare revisions
The history tracking features in Wagtail include options to compare your current draft with previous revisions of the page. You can also restore previous drafts if you need to restore and old version of the page.
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Resizable panels
Whether you prefer a minimalist workspace or prefer to have all panels open all the time, Wagtail's resizable panels give you the option to customize your admin workspace to make it work well for you.
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Keyboard slash command
The Wagtail slash command gives you quick access to StreamField blocks and formatting options. Whether you need to use the keyboard for accessibility reasons or just love using your keyboard, the keyboard slash command helps you maintain flow while creating your content.
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Custom cropping
You can also optionally override the default, detected focal point and define your own by drawing a marquee over the region of the image you want to make sure Wagtail never crops out.
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Multiple image upload
When you’re adding images you can upload multiple images in one go, with a slick user experience and solid workflow. Drag your images into the browser or choose them from your local filesystem; Wagtail displays individual file upload progress for you and when the upload is complete you can then easily add the key metadata for each image from a single screen.
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Intelligent copy and paste
Wagtail's Rich Text field will accept any valid HTML input but without the cruft of inline styles. It means you can copy across linked text, or nested bullets from other sites, email, or documents without having to worry about pesky spans or styling that other systems might have.
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Form builder
Using Wagtail’s form module allows you to create a single page form on your site. Submissions from the form are stored for later retrieval through a new ‘Forms’ section within the Wagtail admin interface. Find out more about the form builder.
Administrative
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Customizable search
The extendable and customizable Wagtail search backend gives you more control over search functions. You also have the options to include third-party search backends like ElasticSearch or Opensearch.
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Usage statistics
Wagtail includes usage statistics for images, documents, and pages so you can track where and how content is being used across your content library. You can use these stats to identify content that needs to be removed or updated.
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Reports
Wagtail comes standard with a set of reports that help you maintain the quality of your content over time. From the aging pages report that identifies old pages to the workflow tasks report that helps you track your workflows, you can use the standard reports to manage your library more effectively. If you need more, you can add custom reports too.
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Simple, configurable permissions
Out of the box Wagtail allows you to add users to different groups with different permissions. You can control who has permissions over different images, documents or pages all through a straightforward user-interface within the admin area of the site. Since Wagtail is just a Django app, developers can augment the complexity around permissions as necessary to the project.
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Easy configuration
Developers can enable searchable fields and define the relevance per model or field.Search results can also be manually promoted using the handy Promoted Search module. If you’re interested in how to implement search for your site you can read our search documentation.
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Workflow support
Content owners and editors can implement refined content workflows for contributions. Authors can submit content for moderation, and editors can apply changes, or return the content to the original author for amendments.
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Multi-site support
Wagtail allows you to run multiple sites via the same admin. It means that, for example, you could run your main website, intranet and satellite sites through the same Wagtail instance allowing you to maintain permission groups across the different sites and a single point where your content producers would need to login.
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Site settings
With the site settings module you can implement editable site content areas to give editors more control. No longer does the address in the footer, or the link to Instagram need to be hardcoded into the template, but can be editable, where it should be, within the CMS. Read more information on the site settings module.
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Wagtail API
With the Wagtail API module you can receive a read-only JSON-based API of your site’s content.
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Integrate with existing Django apps
Wagtail is, at its heart, a Django app, and it'll play nicely with any other Django app in your tech stack.
Performance
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Fast out of the box
Wagtail is lightweight by design, using resources sparingly. It means that it can run on almost any server and give good performance. Wagtail will play nicely with almost any cache you care to use. Torchbox, the creators of Wagtail, have used it with Redis, Varnish and Squid in production.
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Expiring caches
Many sites implement caches to improve performance, and reduce server load. The problem is that sometimes this means that updates take time to become visible. Wagtail’s cache invalidator module helps to solve this problem by allowing individual pages to expire the cache when published or deleted, ensuring your content is always up-to-date, while still getting all the benefits of a cache.
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Static site generation
Wagtail will allow you to generate static sites using django-bakery and the Wagtail Bakery add-on package. It allows you to easily serve static HTML pages to end-users creating a frighteningly quick site with all the advantages of a content management system.
SEO
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Flexible page URL patterns
With Wagtail's Routable Page Mixin module you can provide different views of content via different URLs. For example a blog index page could show a date view of the content at /blog/2013/06/, an author's content view at /blog/authors/bob/, and a tag view at /blog/tagged/python/
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Sitemap
Wagtail supports the creation of sitemaps via our sitemap generator module. This helps Google Search Tools to fully crawl your site and supporting any SEO strategies that you have in place for your site.
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Promoted search
Wagtail also allows you to implement promoted search, to allow editors more control about what to display to end users when they search for content. If you’re interested in implementing the promoted search module for your site you can visit our documentation.
Community
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Community created modules
Want FontAwesome within the admin? Want a different admin layout? A Wordpress to Wagtail importer? A starter site kit? And more… Wagtail has an active community contributing back with solutions to common problems they’ve found. We’re working on a site where they can all be collated but in the meantime you can view the most popular Wagtail modules on Github.
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Excellent test coverage
Wagtail has over 90% test coverage. We’re committed to following a test driven development pattern where all new code contributed to the project must include tests. You can see more details about our test coverage history at Codecov.