Show HN: Wagtail, our new Django CMS

Thanks! Yes, we'll have a live demo soon, and a more in-depth video of the admin functionality even sooner - hopefully in the next few hours.

If you have Vagrant and a reasonable internet connection, the easiest way to try out the admin UI is to clone the demo site at https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo, which includes a range of example content types.

The video is intended to pique the interest of CMS choosers with short attention spans... you're right that it's a poor substitute for a real demo, and we'll try to get something up as soon as possible. What's the best practice for refreshing the content on demo sites? I worry that a scheduled content reset will confuse people who are halfway through trying publishing a test page.

The CoffeeScript and LESS integration is a tricky one. We like LESS but we're worried that npm / lessc is an annoying dependency, and we're considering switching to SASS / SCSS, which has a pure-Python compiler, unlike LESS. Opinions very welcome.

Thank you! It's named after these lovely little birds which hang round our offices (near Oxford, in the UK) from spring to autumn:

https://www.rspb.org.uk/wildlife/birdguide/families/pipits.a...

    pip install pipit

This HN no-link-doctrine is really annoying...

Classifier say 2:

    'Programming Language :: Python :: 2.7'

Some of the tests are the default django assert 1 + 1 = 2, but there are quite a few others scattered about the directories.

So a CMS that works as the client requires and has a very nice UI can't be taken seriously because it has no tests?

That's a very developer focused mindset.

I'm glad it's been open sourced and I hope to see tests added by them or the community, but it's not a deal-breaker for me.

And if you contribute tests I hope they'll be full functional tests to spot cross-browser regressions, JS breaks and the rest ;)

We currently need npm for lessc, as part of django-compressor, to compile LESS. We want to reduce the dependencies as much as possible, so we're looking into converting to SASS / SCSS, which has a pure-Python compiler, or simply shipping the compiled CSS / JS files for people who don't need to change them.

Thanks for the congrats!

Yes, sort of. We evaluated the options of sticking with their commercial CMS or switching to a famous open source CMS which we're very familiar with, but we estimated that it would be cheaper to build the site they wanted from scratch in Django. When we'd finished it felt like a lot of the work was reusable, and the RCA kindly agreed to let us open source the project. We've spent the last few weeks extracting it into a standalone package, but there are definitely still some rough edges: documentation, obviously; more tests; i18n.

Django CMS definitely has more features than Wagtail (and contributors, and impressive example sites). There's a large grid of CMSs and features at https://code.djangoproject.com/wiki/CMSAppsComparison which we haven't added ourselves to yet. We want to resist getting into a CMS feature race - the focus for Wagtail is providing a thoughtful and attractive user interface, and making it as easy as possible for designers to build beautiful sites. As for performance, we haven't done any proper benchmarking, but it feels very fast!

We already support LDAP auth, and CAS and / or Shibboleth is on the roadmap for the near future. More importantly, we'll have proper Sphinx docs soon, with details of the features that are already available.

oops, hazards of working off a live Git repo there :-) Fixed now - please run a git pull / pip install -r requirements/dev.txt and try again!

There are some https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/blob/master/wagtail/wagt... - but not enough, we know. We're on it!

See below - there are tests, see

https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/blob/master/wagtail/wagt... and https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/commit/a77977a31cdfcdf95...

but we need more, and to make it more obvious how to run them. You're right that we have to do more to attract contributors. In the meantime we're offering t-shirts for pull requests...

https://twitter.com/WagtailCMS/status/432166799464210432/

As it happens, the predictive search already returns JSON, but we don't have a general purpose API yet. It's on the list! Pages are just plain Django models under the hood, so Django REST Framework would be a good fit.

What's the third 'framework'?

Whats wrong with that?

Its a CMS built on a framework.

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!

I was hoping no-one would ask that :)

No: the marketing site (http://wagtail.io/) is a single static HTML page. But we're about to add a blog, so we'll convert the whole thing into a Wagtail site, hopefully next week.

Thanks! Wagtail is just a collection of apps which can be added to a standard Django project. Serafeim's tutorial demonstrates this: https://gist.github.com/tomdyson/8974456#creating-and-config...

Note https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo/blob/master/wagtaild... (from the example Wagtail site). To incorporate it into an existing app you'll just need to adjust the URLs so Wagtail isn't taking over the whole URL space.

Thanks! In case you missed it elsewhere there's a tutorial by Wagtail contributor Serafeim Papastefanos here: https://gist.github.com/tomdyson/8974456 but we're working hard on official docs and a proper screencast.

Thanks for the feedback. It's my fault - I kept asking our video guy to speed it up! We're working on a proper 3 minute walk through right now. It should be ready in the next day or so.

ALmost works now:

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

https://index.docker.io/u/oyvindsk/wagtail-demo/

Please let us know if you end up using it. We'll post a Wagtail t-shirt to your sister's bakery!

Yes, multiple sites are supported - there's a single tree for all pages in the system, and any number of sites can be 'rooted' at different points in the tree. (Currently this is configured in Django's own admin interface, but we'll be moving this into the Wagtail interface proper.)

That sounds very delicious to me. this CMS to build sites, and S3 static to host them :)

Wagtail is open-source, so there's nothing stopping you/someone adding that functionality - indeed, it'd be pretty trivial do to as a Django management command that would work something like:

     ./manage.py create_page_stubs path/to/your/list.csv

Yes, but it doesn't (yet) do anything clever like link different language versions of the same article.

On a related subject, we're starting on i18n next week, with the first localisation - Greek - following shortly.