Issue #117 | This Week in Wagtail

27 January 2023

Hello folks and welcome to our revamped version of This Week in Wagtail! 🙌

It’s a new year, and even though we said this would be a weeklyish newsletter, it’s been just a little bit since we’ve been in touch (okay maybe a lotta bit…). Instead of just tossing a bunch of links in your direction, we decided to sit down and think about how we could make this newsletter into one of the best resources for learning about Wagtail.

The result is we’re switching up the format to include one featured practical tip or news item at the top followed by a quick rundown of other useful Wagtail news, tutorials and links. SO! Without further delay, let’s get to our featured tip of the week.

Give new people a quick start with the Wagtail user guide

This is a screenshot of the homepage of the Wagtail user guide, which includes tutorials, how-tos, and other useful information for new Wagtail users.

Have a new user who is unfamiliar with the Wagtail interface? Got an editor who needs a little extra help learning about the different ways Wagtail can help them organise and manage their content? Then you need to drop them a link to the Wagtail user guide.

The user guide was started as a Google Summer of Code project and will be updated with additional articles as new innovations and features are introduced to Wagtail. Currently, the guide is available in English and, thanks to some great contributors at Overcast, it has also been translated into Icelandic.

While Wagtail is highly customisable and there may be some features of your particular installation that aren’t covered in the guide, the user guide is a great place to start for most people. Plus, if there’s something you think we should add, just drop us a line and let us know. We’re always eager to help people get a great start with Wagtail.

Our rundown of the latest chirps

Wagtail 4.1 is out. You can convince all your friends to try the new version of Wagtail with this snappy 30-second video tour or, if they’re looking for a more in-depth write up, they can read about the new features on the Wagtail user guide.
We’re doing Outreachy for the very first time. Come meet our interns!
We refreshed Wagtail.org and shared our not-so-secret sauce for the process in a blog.
There’s a new partnership between Torchbox (the creators of Wagtail) and the Royal National Institute of Blind People that could lead to some new accessibility innovations for Wagtail.

Kick off 2023 with new Wagtail skills

If one of your New Year’s resolutions includes building your own Wagtail website, Michael Yin has updated his in-depth tutorial for Wagtail 4.0. For folks who prefer video, Code with Stein has a new video out on how to build a blog in under 20 minutes.

Have a resolution to contribute to open source? You’ll want to read LB’s sage advice in Ten tasty ingredients for a delicious pull request. Thanks to Outreachy contributor Farouk Yunasa, there are also new resources available on how to set up the Wagtail codebase on Linux and MacOS. Juliet Adeboye also created a step-by-step guide for Windows users who want to set up the Wagtail bakery demo on their machine.

More experienced Wagtail developers who have resolved to try new deployment options this year should check out these tutorials for deploying Wagtail to Render and to Fly.io. And if you’re in the mood for some Headless Wagtail, have a look at this guide for supporting preview mode in Next.js.

New year = new packages

Many community developers have updated their packages to provide support for Wagtail 4.0. Here’s a list of some of the newest packages to consider for your Wagtail project:

Until next time, thank you for reading! If you have a news item to contribute, please reach out to us through our Slack community or email us.