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Wagtail

A Django content management system focused on flexibility and user experience
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What is Wagtail?

Wagtail is a Django content management system built originally for the Royal College of Art and focused on flexibility and user experience.
Wagtail is a tool in the Self-Hosted Blogging / CMS category of a tech stack.
Wagtail is an open source tool with GitHub stars and GitHub forks. Here’s a link to Wagtail's open source repository on GitHub

Who uses Wagtail?

Companies
20 companies reportedly use Wagtail in their tech stacks, including thermondo, backend, and Django.

Developers
125 developers on StackShare have stated that they use Wagtail.
Pros of Wagtail
23
Highly customizable
18
Very Flexible
18
StreamFields are amazing
15
Web content management
13
Non-tech colleagues can update website content
11
Fast as hell
10
Easy setup
9
Customizable
7
Solid documentation
3
Very High Performance
2
Plugins & themes
1
No dynamic blocks nesting (e.g. like in Umbraco CMS)
1
Good for geeks and not for the business
1
Everything's a heavy lifting
0
The Wharton School
Decisions about Wagtail

Here are some stack decisions, common use cases and reviews by companies and developers who chose Wagtail in their tech stack.

Needs advice
on
AstroAstroSvelteKitSvelteKit
and
Vue.jsVue.js

Hello everybody! I want to create an easy to use website (and simplified) builder. Users create a site, add their domain and edit Pages inside an Admin Area inside predefined "Blocks" like with Wagtail.

There should be several default templates/themes and layouts. Choosing a different theme might change both the layout and styling. And I'm looking for SSR or SSG with a focus on the end-user's Page performance.

Current Stack:

  • GraphQL for the dynamic part (for example data to Pricing might not be required on the homepage, or images might go into gallery in one theme, and on the homepage in another theme)

  • FastAPI and SQLAlchemy to store Data. I have prior experience with Wagtail and Django and want to stay with Python and learn Fastapi

  • NGINX to handle domain-specific things (the how is not yet refined)

I want a scalable architecture and especially a fast frontend. I'm tending to use SvelteKit, but I'm afraid that the dynamic part won't make me happy after having hundreds of sites, as the bundler cannot load themes dynamically. sveltekit - dynamic import

I want to handle the scenario: Admin-User chooses a theme and other options for the site (domain) and the End-User Frontend/Session/Cookie will have to fetch and store data about the theme and load subsequent calls to prerendered sites.

Also the "hundreds of sites" might not be all covered by 5 Themes, because users may purchase a custom-made theme, and I would have to manage one big project having lots of different Styleguides and flows. I even thought of statically building the site whenever the user makes a change, maybe using Hugo (or VitePress?). Then I would have to take more care with the page recreation and it would be easily routable instead of nesting every component with logic in the frontend... I think. But this I haven't thought through yet.

Can anyone please help?

See more

Wagtail's Features

  • A fast, attractive editor interface
  • Complete control over design with standard Django templates
  • Configure content types through standard Django models
  • Tightly integrated search (with an Elasticsearch backend for production)
  • Strong document and image management
  • Wide support for embedded content
  • Simple, configurable permissions
  • Support for tree-based content organisation
  • Optional preview->submit->approve workflow
  • Fast out of the box. Varnish-friendly if you need it
  • A simple form builder
  • Optional static site generation
  • Excellent test coverage

Wagtail Alternatives & Comparisons

What are some alternatives to Wagtail?
WordPress
The core software is built by hundreds of community volunteers, and when you’re ready for more there are thousands of plugins and themes available to transform your site into almost anything you can imagine. Over 60 million people have chosen WordPress to power the place on the web they call “home” — we’d love you to join the family.
Django CMS
It is user friendly and has a very intuitive drag and drop interface. It's built around the needs of multi-lingual publishing by default. Its lightweight core makes it easy to integrate with other software and put to use immediately, while its ease of use makes it the go-to choice for content managers, content editors and website admins.
Drupal
Drupal is an open source content management platform powering millions of websites and applications. It’s built, used, and supported by an active and diverse community of people around the world.
Django
Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
Strapi
Strapi is100% JavaScript, extensible, and fully customizable. It enables developers to build projects faster by providing a customizable API out of the box and giving them the freedom to use the their favorite tools.
See all alternatives

Wagtail's Followers
283 developers follow Wagtail to keep up with related blogs and decisions.