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Comment by nsomaru | Hacker News Reader

Would love to know your thoughts on wagtail? I've been evaluating it (as against django cms mostly), but resources seem generally scarce - there's no big irc channel, the mailing list directs you to SO, and SO doesn't seem particularly active on the wagtail front either. So where do you go for help or if you need to bounce something off someone more experienced in Wagtail than yourself?

Streamfield looks great! It seems a perfect replacement to my rigid model-per-content-type approach.

Wagtail's deviation from standard Django patterns (no views!) are a little concerning too.

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I'm one of the Wagtail core developers. We made the mistake of spreading our support across too many channels (Google Groups, Stack Overflow, IRC, semi-private Slack) but we've made a clear decision to focus on Stack Overflow for developer-related questions:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/wagtail

mainly as a result of this poll:

https://twitter.com/WagtailCMS/status/801384753589080064

Please feel free to contact me directly (details in profile) if you're not getting the support you need on SO.

Yeah, Wagtail documentation is a bit scattered. That's probably one of the larger issues I've run into when using it.

Overall, I like it though. As much as it seems like a deviation from Django patterns, I actually found it easier to integrate Wagtail into existing Django projects than others like django-cms. I find that I typically end up with a "CMS" part of the app that exists fairly independently from the rest. Making foreign-key references to models outside Wagtail isn't too hard, and it integrates fine with the main site templates. Otherwise, I find that I don't often need to do much interaction between the Wagtail parts and other parts (which would be hard). I haven't really done a lot of complicated things with Wagtail though.

Wagtail has a good tutorial to get you started (http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/getting_started/tutorial.ht...) and has good enough documentation (that I think would need some improvements). I know it seems a bit overwhelming to start a new project but you can try to learn from existing ones that are available for example the good-old wagtaildemo: https://github.com/wagtail/wagtaildemo, the better-wagtail-demo: https://github.com/wagtail/bakerydemo and of course the RCA (https://www.rca.ac.uk) website https://github.com/torchbox/verdant-rca/ (be careful this is a huge project that uses a little old version of wagtail - 1.6 but most base things are the same in later versions)

Now, for answering your questions I think that Stackoverflow should be fine for asking, most (if not all) questions are answered there (I know that most wagtail developers monitor SO for new questions and answer them promptly). Don't be discouraged by the small volume of questions -- the only problem with SO is that some questions (the more open ones, for example those discussing architecture) are not considered proper for this site and are closed so you should use the mailing list for that.

For the StreamField I totally agree that it rocks however keep in mind that you'll still need to add a model-per-content-type (maybe not so many content types but you will definitely need more than one content type) - I think that the StreamField offers more freedom to the hands of the content editors, using it they can mix and match their content to the page and not follow specific patterns that the developers have decided.

Finally, concerning the deviation from views, don't be alarmed. Wagtail uses a concept called Page (probably should've been called PageType or WagtailContentType but anyway) which is a mixture between a Model and a class based view. So you create your own subclass of pages which are Articles, NewsItems, Events etc. The important thing is that most functionality of CBVs is inherited when serving each Page type so you can override the various class methods like get_context (to add specific things to the context of a page), get_template (to change the template of a page type), serve (to have full control on serving the page) etc. Also you can add mixins similar to CBVs so that many of your Pages will share some functionality.

I recommend you try wagtail and I think that you'll like it!

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