Customising the page editing interface

Customising the tabbed interface

New in version 1.0.

As standard, Wagtail organises panels into three tabs: ‘Content’, ‘Promote’ and ‘Settings’. Depending on the requirements of your site, you may wish to customise this for specific page types - for example, adding an additional tab for sidebar content. This can be done by specifying an edit_handler property on the page model. For example:

from wagtail.wagtailadmin.edit_handlers import TabbedInterface, ObjectList

class BlogPage(Page):
    # field definitions omitted

    content_panels = [
        FieldPanel('title', classname="full title"),
        FieldPanel('date'),
        FieldPanel('body', classname="full"),
    ]
    sidebar_content_panels = [
        SnippetChooserPanel('advert'),
        InlinePanel('related_links', label="Related links"),
    ]

    edit_handler = TabbedInterface([
        ObjectList(content_panels, heading='Content'),
        ObjectList(sidebar_content_panels, heading='Sidebar content'),
        ObjectList(Page.promote_panels, heading='Promote'),
        ObjectList(Page.settings_panels, heading='Settings', classname="settings"),
    ])

Rich Text (HTML)

Wagtail provides a general-purpose WYSIWYG editor for creating rich text content (HTML) and embedding media such as images, video, and documents. To include this in your models, use the RichTextField function when defining a model field:

from wagtail.wagtailcore.fields import RichTextField
from wagtail.wagtailadmin.edit_handlers import FieldPanel


class BookPage(Page):
    book_text = RichTextField()

    content_panels = Page.content_panels + [
        FieldPanel('body', classname="full"),
    ]

RichTextField inherits from Django’s basic TextField field, so you can pass any field parameters into RichTextField as if using a normal Django field. This field does not need a special panel and can be defined with FieldPanel.

However, template output from RichTextField is special and need to be filtered to preserve embedded content. See Rich text (filter).

If you’re interested in extending the capabilities of the Wagtail WYSIWYG editor (hallo.js), See Extending the WYSIWYG Editor (hallo.js).

Extending the WYSIWYG Editor (hallo.js)

To inject JavaScript into the Wagtail page editor, see the insert_editor_js hook. Once you have the hook in place and your hallo.js plugin loads into the Wagtail page editor, use the following JavaScript to register the plugin with hallo.js.

registerHalloPlugin(name, opts);

hallo.js plugin names are prefixed with the "IKS." namespace, but the name you pass into registerHalloPlugin() should be without the prefix. opts is an object passed into the plugin.

For information on developing custom hallo.js plugins, see the project’s page: https://github.com/bergie/hallo

Image Formats in the Rich Text Editor

On loading, Wagtail will search for any app with the file image_formats.py and execute the contents. This provides a way to customise the formatting options shown to the editor when inserting images in the RichTextField editor.

As an example, add a “thumbnail” format:

# image_formats.py
from wagtail.wagtailimages.formats import Format, register_image_format

register_image_format(Format('thumbnail', 'Thumbnail', 'richtext-image thumbnail', 'max-120x120'))

To begin, import the the Format class, register_image_format function, and optionally unregister_image_format function. To register a new Format, call the register_image_format with the Format object as the argument. The Format class takes the following constructor arguments:

name
The unique key used to identify the format. To unregister this format, call unregister_image_format with this string as the only argument.
label
The label used in the chooser form when inserting the image into the RichTextField.
classnames

The string to assign to the class attribute of the generated <img> tag.

Note

Any class names you provide must have CSS rules matching them written separately, as part of the front end CSS code. Specifying a classnames value of left will only ensure that class is output in the generated markup, it won’t cause the image to align itself left.

filter_spec
The string specification to create the image rendition. For more, see the Using images in templates.

To unregister, call unregister_image_format with the string of the name of the Format as the only argument.