Wagtail Space - Day 1 wrapup

Training sessions

After the tour, it was time to start the training session. The sessions were done Q&A style. After an introductory round, we had a fairly good idea of what each of the attendees wanted to learn. We had a total 14 people that were interested in joining the training session, with varying levels of experience. Therefore we decided to split the group into two groups: experienced developers and very experienced developers.

The experienced developers installed the Wagtail demo project, enabled the modeladmin and experimented with that. We also discussed the applications of stream fields and how these overlap with those of the rich text editor. We looked at ways to customise the rich text editor (using hooks). We also played with the formbuilder and looked into some individual blockers.

The very experienced group dove right in. There were a couple of specific questions we tried to answer. The first thing we talked about was how to set up a multisite Wagtail instance with editors and moderators that can only access their specific site. Luckily, we did not need to write any code for this one, as it could easily be solved by setting up groups that only have the required permissions on the root page of each site. Then we went on to customize the model admin interface by overriding the template and we customized the admin navigation by adding pages without subpages to it.

Talks

The afternoon was reserved for talks. Multiple attendees talked about different topics all related to Wagtail. First up was Edd Baldry, who talked about agile and how Wagtail is inherently agile and thus supports users in working in this fashion. Ben van 't Ende then talked about building a community. Though he is not particularly familiar with the Wagtail community, he has a lot of experience building communities around the world, which made for an interesting talk and some discussion on the topic. The first block of talks was closed off by Daniele Procida, who talked about deploying Wagtail to the Divio Cloud, a deployment platform his company created.

After a short break, the next three talks were up. Robin van der Rijst talked about the ways in which he and his company use Wagtail in practice and also about the aspects he likes and those he thinks could be improved. Edd Baldry then talked about and showed a nice improvement on the current streamfield implementation he is working on. Tom Dyson gave a preview of Wagtail Experiments, an add-on that allows A/B-testing within wagtail.

Another short break later, two more speakers rounded up the talks for today. Bertrand Bordage discussed what needs to be done to improve the preview function within Wagtail. Finally, Matt Westcott gave some insights into the zen of Wagtail, his Wagtail-specific take on the well-known zen of Python.

Lightning talks

The program for the the day ended with lightning talks. These are short talks of 5 minutes max and not necessarily related to Wagtail. There were various interesting talks about topics such as migrating your Plone site to Wagtail, a download counter add-on, using Open Shift, using React Engine to render templates, a client's view on what a CMS needs in order to meet the customer's demands, managing running hundreds of (Wagtail) sites in production and about maintaining situational awareness while coding.

In case you missed the talks, don't worry! They're up on YouTube.