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Comment by tomd | Hacker News Reader

Developer docs: currently https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo/blob/master/README.m... and this tutorial from contributor Serafeim Papastefanos: https://gist.github.com/tomdyson/8974456

Clearly this isn't enough and we're working on proper Sphinx docs which should be ready in the next few days.

Extensibility: it's just a Django app, so you can include it in your existing project, or add your own apps / views / middleware etc. There are some hooks, e.g. for including your app into the main admin navigation - see https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/blob/master/wagtail/wagt... for an example of where a hook gets called. It's a good candidate for developer docs!

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That looks interesting. I've got a CMS which shares some philosophical similarities to Wagtail. It's a lot clunkier and uglier though. I wish I had the time to add some polish. I think the 'pages have types' idea is spot on and something all the other Django CMS's I've seen seem to get wrong. (too much freedom for the user to create 'Frankenstein pages' by arbitrarily combining blocks).

The editor and image library is very nice.

I feel you've gone slightly too far in the 'flat and beautiful' direction. Some UI elements lack affordance and I think usability has suffered slightly at the hand of aesthetics.

Finally I still feel there's a case for not completely replacing contrib.admin but that is a complex debate and I can see in your specific case you probably made the right decision. I'd really like to see if I could achieve some of your elegance without abandoning (or reinventing!) contrib.admin.

Best of luck!

Thank you very much for your thoughtful feedback. We're pleased with the UI but obviously it's not perfect - I've just started using slack.com which is also pretty flat but feels like a new benchmark for usability. I'll discuss it with the design team, and if you have any more specific feedback we'd love to hear it.

There are still a couple of Wagtail features which rely on contrib.admin. We have to decide whether to smarten up the contrib.admin UI or pull them into the Wagtail admin. Is your CMS available somewhere public?

Not public public but there's a Git url, I'm happy to share if you drop me an email: andy@andybak.net

Mezzanine takes that exact approach where pages are of specific types, and has consistently rejected calls to add arbitrary block features (although you can do that with add-ons).

Surprised you haven't looked at it - it's the most downloaded of all the Django CMSes.

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