Wagtail Space 2018, day two

This year has been my first experience with Wagtail Space, and as intern at Four Digits it has been very impressive and educational to experience all of it. Today I have been listening to the annual ‘State of Wagtail’ meeting with the core team. It’s a quick look back on what the year was like, and where Wagtail is going next year.

It has been a big year for Wagtail. Thousands of sites are built. High profile organizations have been using Wagtail, including the NHS (National Health Service UK). The biggest government migration from Microsoft SharePoint to Wagtail has happened, and it’s going well!

A lot of new features have been added this year as well, including: Draftail, Explorer and PostgreSQL search. Draftail is an improved rich text editor, to make the user experience even better. Thanks to explorer you’ll create and edit your website even faster than before. Also, Postgres search came out of the box!

To make the next year an even better year, a few goals have been set to reach the top 10 of Content Management Systems. Wagtail must be for everyone, not only Django developers. We would like to see our community grow, and to make this happen, we will invest in making the code more accessible, so it’ll be even easier to contribute.

Some points of improvement are: - Streamfields - Restructure the code, so that it's easier to maintain and contribute.

• Editor – This has already been improved a lot, but we are already thinking ahead: What’s next? Rich text editing. Most content is just text; how can we get a better experience?

• Search – Last year it was changed and there’s a plan to work on improving search in Wagtail and API to do way more complex queries than before. You could not search for two terms, but now it will be possible. Autocomplete and integration will be next. Fuzzy search, typos and corrections too.

• Community – To build a bigger community, madewithwagtail was created. This is a showcase of different sites created with wagtail.

As you can see there are many plans for the next year, and I’m looking forward to day 3 to learn even more about Wagtail, and the community behind it.