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Wagtail

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91 pointsforloop24 comments

I'm from Torchbox, the UK agency who created this CMS. We launched Wagtail here on HN just over a year ago, and are currently preparing to release version 1.0, whose headline feature is 'StreamField', our attempt to handle the old CMS dilemma of editor flexibility versus structured data:

https://torchbox.com/blog/rich-text-fields-and-faster-horses...

It's been an exciting year for us, but we've seen a significant increase in interest in the last couple of months, with a handful of household names adopting Wagtail, including one particularly high profile site which we hope to be able to talk about soon.

I have done R&D to find Django CMS and e-commerce like OpenCart and I spotted Wagtail but I felt it's still growing and didn't reach the level Wordpress. PHP web apps are mature than Django Apps and we need to support this.

Please give me guideline on who to contribute or even how to use it and I'll do my best to help.

Contributing - there's a big list of Github issues you can help with:

https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/issues

How to use it - the docs are pretty comprehensive:

http://docs.wagtail.io/en/v0.8.6/

Getting help - join the user group:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/wagtail

We've been looking at several CMS's to use for our upcoming website rewrites. Since our content is quite broad and unique in the way that it links together, we've found that existing solutions doesn't really fit into the usual CMS solutions. Therefore we've been looking at using something which is focused on providing an API to the content.

Examples of these:

- https://prismic.io/

- https://www.contentful.com/

- https://github.com/aheinze/cockpit

Personally, I believe more CMS solutions needs to provide a powerful API for dealing with storing and retrieving content.

What does Wagtail have to offer in this respect?

Several of Wagtail's users are using it just like this - a tool for authoring and managing content, with an API for delivering content to web, mobile and print channels.

Here's the API documentation:

http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/contrib/api/

Bit of a plug but (as the developer of) Spontaneous[0] I can highly recommend it for this kind of use case.

It aims to be decoupled, that is the system you edit with is not (necessarily) tied into the system you serve your site to the public with. It does this through a publishing mechanism. This defaults to rendering HTML pages (both static & dynamic ones) but can be extended to output anything you want, either replacing the standard HTML output or in addition to it (I personally have integrated with a pyramid based python app using a db based output, that is effectively "render my content into a db table" but you can do less esoteric things like publish JSON or XML docs if that's your need.

It works using content type 'blocks' composed of sets of many fields (of varying types). I like to think of it as a "strongly typed" CMS.

[0]: https://github.com/SpontaneousCMS/spontaneous

My agency spent a while planning a Node.js API CMS build of our own, as well as evaluating Prismic and Contentful. We needed something we could confidently sell to clients, that was open source, user friendly and easy to extend. It also had to run on our clients' own stacks and meet their audit criteria. Wagtail suits those requirements well.

It's worth noting that the Wagtail API module is for GETting content at this point – though I hear a more fully featured read/write API is in the works. Wagtail "is just Django" so it's easy enough to plug in the REST framework and build endpoints on that.

I implemented Prismic for a startup recently, and the API is also read-only. It's got some very powerful semantic content markup and versioning stuff, but I found it quite a chore to get more than single nodes out of it. In the end, our content editors didn't like the git-centric "content releases" metaphor, so they moved off to something else.

Contentful has the read/write API thing down, good support, very actively developed. Unfortunately it doesn't support tree-based content, preferring flat collections with relations, though trees are something many users are asking for. As we're migrating lots of sites (off a PHP CMS) that have well-tested trees, we couldn't quite go that far just yet.

tl;dr? No solution is perfect, but Wagtail is making us happy devs, and the community is very friendly. Good luck with your CMS hunt!

The developers did a SHOW HN launching wagtail.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7231164

Wagtail looks nice, although I haven't used it much.

(shameless plug:) I made a Docker image for the Wagtail Demo to make it easier to test out:

https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/oyvindsk/wagtail-demo/ https://github.com/oyvindsk/docker-playground/tree/master/do...

    docker run -p 8000:8000 -d oyvindsk/wagtail-demo

Haven't tried it in a while, but hopefully it still works :)

This is actually pretty neat. As someone who has worked on many wordpress sites for a long time, having faster everything would be amazing.

The product looks very polished and I hope to see it grow and develop a large community. That would make it a real WP competitor since the main reason WP is so powerful now is because of all the themes, documentation, and plugins.

A very major reason on why Wordpress is so widely used, is how easy it is to install on just about anything above a toaster.

Meanwhile, this is how you install Wagtail: http://spapas.github.io/2014/02/13/wagtail-tutorial/

That was a very helpful introduction in Wagtail's early days, but setup and installation has become much simpler since then. For Python developers it's as simple as

  pip install wagtail
  wagtail start mysite

Or you can deploy the demo to Heroku in one click:

https://heroku.com/deploy?template=https://github.com/torchb...

That works really nicely, I like the use of vagrant but it does give a hint that there might be rather complex requirements.

On a different note, I saw your Bristol Media post about Django freelancers the other week and have been meaning to get in touch (my current contract ends in a month and a half). Does much of this dev work happen in the Bristol office or is it primarily London-lead?

We're always looking for good Django freelancers, wherever they're based, but particularly in Oxford and Bristol. Email my first name at torchbox.com.

Django should have some simple plugin install system built-in, auto update capability like in WordPress. It's not friendly to test different modules as one must always dig the settings.py and hunt the docs of relevant modules.

Is the backend coupled to the front end? Or can I render the resulting data with whatever I want?

They have an API http://docs.wagtail.io/en/latest/contrib/api/

No, it's a clear tenet of Wagtail's design that it should place no restrictions on how you render content.

There's an extra ">" in the "Wagtail in action" section.

Oh no! Not another scrolling CMS... whitespace seems to be trendy.

> Free

> We use a BSD license.

I see in no way how a BSD License is free. I think the word Open-source is better suited here.

Maybe it's nitpicking. I wish English had more words that describe "free"-ness (gratis vs frei) etc.

EDIT: Okay a few words later they're also saying freedom. So I guess it's not nitpicking as I don't see how BSD gives you 'freedom'.

> EDIT: Okay a few words later they're also saying freedom. So I guess it's not nitpicking as I don't see how BSD gives you 'freedom'.

Perhaps I'm really misunderstanding this but with a BSD license I thought I could:

* Take the code and use it for free

* Take the code and use it for free to make money

* Take the code and add to it and re-release it open-source (as long as I include the same license)

* Take the code and add to it and re-release it closed-source (as long as I include the same license)

Sounds like I've got quite a lot of freedom in what I do with it. The only things that I can't do (as far as I can tell) are:

* Redistribute the code without that license

* Say the the creators endorse my work without permission

> I see in no way how a BSD License is free.

The FSF are quite happy to describe it as a free software licence https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.html#ModifiedBSD - not sure who else's definition you'd rather use...?

Free Software includes BSD, always has, and certainly does under the Free Software Definition.

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/free-sw.html

(This statement is void if the BSD license is old enough to contain the Obnoxious Advertising Clause. No BSD license variants do these days, primarily because it was Obnoxious.

More information:

https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/bsd.html

http://bsd.slashdot.org/story/99/09/02/189210/berkeley-remov...

The Amazing Disappearing BSD License (or, A License Gets De-Clause-d):

https://urchin.earth.li/~twic/The_Amazing_Disappearing_BSD_L...

)

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