
Wagtail - forloop
https://wagtail.io/
======
tomd
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...](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.

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emadmokhtar
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.

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

[https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/issues](https://github.com/torchbox/wagtail/issues)

How to use it - the docs are pretty comprehensive:

[http://docs.wagtail.io/en/v0.8.6/](http://docs.wagtail.io/en/v0.8.6/)

Getting help - join the user group:

[https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/wagtail](https://groups.google.com/forum/#!forum/wagtail)

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jbrooksuk
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://prismic.io/)

\- [https://www.contentful.com/](https://www.contentful.com/)

\- [https://github.com/aheinze/cockpit](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?

~~~
joshbarr
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!

------
chanux
The developers did a SHOW HN launching wagtail.

[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7231164](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7231164)

------
gizzlon
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://registry.hub.docker.com/u/oyvindsk/wagtail-demo/)
[https://github.com/oyvindsk/docker-
playground/tree/master/do...](https://github.com/oyvindsk/docker-
playground/tree/master/dockerfiles/wagtaildemo)

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

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

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adamcanady
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.

~~~
Andrenid
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/](http://spapas.github.io/2014/02/13/wagtail-tutorial/)

~~~
tomd
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...](https://heroku.com/deploy?template=https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo)

~~~
MatthewWilkes
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?

~~~
tomd
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.

------
Ciantic
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.

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

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

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

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

------
arianvanp
> 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'.

~~~
IanCal
> 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

