Wagtail 1.0 release notes

July 16, 2015

What’s changed

StreamField - a field type for freeform content

StreamField provides an editing model for freeform content such as blog posts and news stories, allowing diverse content types such as text, images, headings, video and more specialised types such as maps and charts to be mixed in any order. See How to use StreamField for mixed content.

Wagtail API - A RESTful API for your Wagtail site

When installed, the new Wagtail API module provides a RESTful web API to your Wagtail site. You can use this for accessing your raw field content for your sites pages, images and documents in JSON format.

MySQL support

Wagtail now officially supports MySQL as a database backend.

Django 1.8 support

Wagtail now officially supports running under Django 1.8.

Vanilla project template

The built-in project template is more like the Django built-in one with several Wagtail-specific additions. It includes bare minimum settings and two apps (home and search).

Minor changes

  • Dropped Django 1.6 support

  • Dropped Python 2.6 and 3.2 support

  • Dropped Elasticsearch 0.90.x support

  • Removed dependency on libsass

  • Users without usernames can now be created and edited in the admin interface

  • Added new translations for Croatian and Finnish

Core

  • The Page model now records the date/time that a page was first published, as the field first_published_at

  • Increased the maximum length of a page slug from 50 to 255 characters

  • Added hooks register_rich_text_embed_handler and register_rich_text_link_handler for customising link / embed handling within rich text fields

  • Page URL paths can now be longer than 255 characters

Admin

UI

  • Improvements to the layout of the left-hand menu footer

  • Menu items of custom apps are now highlighted when being used

  • Added thousands separator for counters on dashboard

  • Added contextual links to admin notification messages

  • When copying pages, it is now possible to specify a place to copy to

  • Added pagination to the snippets listing and chooser

  • Page / document / image / snippet choosers now include a link to edit the chosen item

  • Plain text fields in the page editor now use auto-expanding text areas

  • Added “Add child page” button to admin userbar

  • Added update notifications (See: Wagtail update notifications)

Page editor

  • JavaScript includes in the admin backend have been moved to the HTML header, to accommodate form widgets that render inline scripts that depend on libraries such as jQuery

  • The external link chooser in rich text areas now accepts URLs of the form ‘/some/local/path’, to allow linking to non-Wagtail-controlled URLs within the local site

  • Bare text entered in rich text areas is now automatically wrapped in a paragraph element

Edit handlers API

  • FieldPanel now accepts an optional widget parameter to override the field’s default form widget

  • Page model fields without a FieldPanel are no longer displayed in the form

  • No longer need to specify the base model on InlinePanel definitions

  • Page classes can specify an edit_handler property to override the default Content / Promote / Settings tabbed interface. See Customizing the tabbed interface.

Other admin changes

  • SCSS files in wagtailadmin now use absolute imports, to permit overriding by user stylesheets

  • Removed the dependency on LOGIN_URL and LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL settings

  • Password reset view names namespaced to wagtailadmin

  • Removed the need to add permission check on admin views (now automated)

  • Reversing django.contrib.auth.admin.login will no longer lead to Wagtails login view (making it easier to have frontend login views)

  • Added cache-control headers to all admin views. This allows Varnish/Squid/CDN to run on vanilla settings in front of a Wagtail site

  • Date / time pickers now consistently use times without seconds, to prevent JavaScript behaviour glitches when focusing / unfocusing fields

  • Added hook construct_homepage_summary_items for customising the site summary panel on the admin homepage

  • Renamed the construct_wagtail_edit_bird hook to construct_wagtail_userbar

  • ‘static’ template tags are now used throughout the admin templates, in place of STATIC_URL

Docs

  • Support for django-sendfile added

  • Documents now served with correct mime-type

  • Support for If-Modified-Since HTTP header

Routable pages

  • Added a new decorator-based syntax for RoutablePage, compatible with Django 1.8

Bug fixes

  • The document_served signal now correctly passes the Document class as sender and the document as instance

  • Image edit page no longer throws OSError when the original image is missing

  • Collapsible blocks stay open on any form error

  • Document upload modal no longer switches tabs on form errors

  • with_metaclass is now imported from Django’s bundled copy of the six library, to avoid errors on Mac OS X from an outdated system copy of the library being imported

Upgrade considerations

Support for older Django/Python/Elasticsearch versions dropped

This release drops support for Django 1.6, Python 2.6/3.2 and Elasticsearch 0.90.x. Please make sure these are updated before upgrading.

If you are upgrading from Elasticsearch 0.90.x, you may also need to update the elasticsearch pip package to a version greater than 1.0 as well.

Wagtail version upgrade notifications are enabled by default

Starting from Wagtail 1.0, the admin dashboard will (for admin users only) perform a check to see if newer releases are available. This also provides the Wagtail team with the hostname of your Wagtail site. If you’d rather not receive update notifications, or if you’d like your site to remain unknown, you can disable it by adding this line to your settings file:

WAGTAIL_ENABLE_UPDATE_CHECK = False

InlinePanel definitions no longer need to specify the base model

In previous versions of Wagtail, inline child blocks on a page or snippet were defined using a declaration like:

InlinePanel(HomePage, 'carousel_items', label="Carousel items")

It is no longer necessary to pass the base model as a parameter, so this declaration should be changed to:

InlinePanel('carousel_items', label="Carousel items")

The old format is now deprecated; all existing InlinePanel declarations should be updated to the new format.

Custom image models should now set the admin_form_fields attribute

Django 1.8 now requires that all the fields in a ModelForm must be defined in its Meta.fields attribute.

As Wagtail uses Django’s ModelForm for creating image model forms, we’ve added a new attribute called admin_form_fields that should be set to a tuple of field names on the image model.

See Custom image models for an example.

You no longer need LOGIN_URL and LOGIN_REDIRECT_URL to point to Wagtail admin.

If you are upgrading from an older version of Wagtail, you probably want to remove these from your project settings.

Previously, these two settings needed to be set to wagtailadmin_login and wagtailadmin_dashboard respectively or Wagtail would become very tricky to log in to. This is no longer the case and Wagtail should work fine without them.

RoutablePage now uses decorator syntax for defining views

In previous versions of Wagtail, page types that used the RoutablePageMixin had endpoints configured by setting their subpage_urls attribute to a list of urls with view names. This will not work on Django 1.8 as view names can no longer be passed into a url (see: https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/stable/releases/1.8/#django-conf-urls-patterns).

Wagtail 1.0 introduces a new syntax where each view function is annotated with a @route decorator - see RoutablePageMixin.

The old subpage_urls convention will continue to work on Django versions prior to 1.8, but this is now deprecated; all existing RoutablePage definitions should be updated to the decorator-based convention.

Upgrading from the external wagtailapi module.

If you were previously using the external wagtailapi module (which has now become wagtail.contrib.wagtailapi). Please be aware of the following backwards-incompatible changes:

1. Representation of foreign keys has changed

Foreign keys were previously represented by just the value of their primary key. For example:

"feed_image": 1

This has now been changed to add some meta information:

"feed_image": {
    "id": 1,
    "meta": {
        "type": "wagtailimages.Image",
        "detail_url": "http://api.example.com/api/v1/images/1/"
    }
}

2. On the page detail view, the “parent” field has been moved out of meta

Previously, there was a “parent” field in the “meta” section on the page detail view:

{
    "id": 10,
    "meta": {
         "type": "demo.BlogPage",
         "parent": 2
    },

    ...
}

This has now been moved to the top level. Also, the above change to how foreign keys are represented applies to this field too:

{
    "id": 10,
    "meta": {
         "type": "demo.BlogPage"
    },
    "parent": {
         "id": 2,
         "meta": {
             "type": "demo.BlogIndexPage"
         }
    }

    ...
}

Celery no longer automatically used for sending notification emails

Previously, Wagtail would try to use Celery whenever the djcelery module was installed, even if Celery wasn’t actually set up. This could cause a very hard to track down problem where notification emails would not be sent so this functionality has now been removed.

If you would like to keep using Celery for sending notification emails, have a look at: django-celery-email

Login/Password reset views renamed

It was previously possible to reverse the Wagtail login view using django.contrib.auth.views.login. This is no longer possible. Update any references to wagtailadmin_login.

Password reset view name has changed from password_reset to wagtailadmin_password_reset.

JavaScript includes in admin backend have been moved

To improve compatibility with third-party form widgets, pages within the Wagtail admin backend now output their JavaScript includes in the HTML header, rather than at the end of the page. If your project extends the admin backend (through the register_admin_menu_item hook, for example) you will need to ensure that all associated JavaScript code runs correctly from the new location. In particular, any code that accesses HTML elements will need to be contained in an ‘onload’ handler (e.g. jQuery’s $(document).ready()).

EditHandler internal API has changed

While it is not an official Wagtail API, it has been possible for Wagtail site implementers to define their own EditHandler subclasses for use in panel definitions, to customise the behaviour of the page / snippet editing forms. If you have made use of this facility, you will need to update your custom EditHandlers, as this mechanism has been refactored (to allow EditHandler classes to keep a persistent reference to their corresponding model). If you have only used Wagtail’s built-in panel types (FieldPanel, InlinePanel, PageChooserPanel and so on), you are unaffected by this change.

Previously, functions like FieldPanel acted as ‘factory’ functions, where a call such as FieldPanel('title') constructed and returned an EditHandler subclass tailored to work on a ‘title’ field. These functions now return an object with a bind_to_model method instead; the EditHandler subclass can be obtained by calling this with the model class as a parameter. As a guide to updating your custom EditHandler code, you may wish to refer to the relevant change to the Wagtail codebase.

chooser_panel templates are obsolete

If you have added your own custom admin views to the Wagtail admin (e.g. through the register_admin_urls hook), you may have used one of the following template includes to incorporate a chooser element for pages, documents, images or snippets into your forms:

  • wagtailadmin/edit_handlers/chooser_panel.html

  • wagtailadmin/edit_handlers/page_chooser_panel.html

  • wagtaildocs/edit_handlers/document_chooser_panel.html

  • wagtailimages/edit_handlers/image_chooser_panel.html

  • wagtailsnippets/edit_handlers/snippet_chooser_panel.html

All of these templates are now deprecated. Wagtail now provides a set of Django form widgets for this purpose - AdminPageChooser, AdminDocumentChooser, AdminImageChooser and AdminSnippetChooser - which can be used in place of the HiddenInput widget that these form fields were previously using. The field can then be rendered using the regular wagtailadmin/shared/field.html or wagtailadmin/shared/field_as_li.html template.

document_served signal arguments have changed

Previously, the document_served signal (which is fired whenever a user downloads a document) passed the document instance as the sender. This has now been changed to correspond the behaviour of Django’s built-in signals; sender is now the Document class, and the document instance is passed as the argument instance. Any existing signal listeners that expect to receive the document instance in sender must now be updated to check the instance argument instead.

Custom image models must specify an admin_form_fields list

Previously, the forms for creating and editing images followed Django’s default behaviour of showing all fields defined on the model; this would include any custom fields specific to your project that you defined by subclassing AbstractImage and setting WAGTAILIMAGES_IMAGE_MODEL. This behaviour is risky as it may lead to fields being unintentionally exposed to the user, and so Django has deprecated this, for removal in Django 1.8. Accordingly, if you create your own custom subclass of AbstractImage, you must now provide an admin_form_fields property, listing the fields that should appear on the image creation / editing form - for example:

from wagtail.wagtailimages.models import AbstractImage, Image

class MyImage(AbstractImage):
    photographer = models.CharField(max_length=255)
    has_legal_approval = models.BooleanField()

    admin_form_fields = Image.admin_form_fields + ['photographer']

construct_wagtail_edit_bird hook has been renamed

Previously you could customise the Wagtail userbar using the construct_wagtail_edit_bird hook. The hook has been renamed to construct_wagtail_userbar.

The old hook is now deprecated; all existing construct_wagtail_edit_bird declarations should be updated to the new hook.

IMAGE_COMPRESSION_QUALITY setting has been renamed

The IMAGE_COMPRESSION_QUALITY setting, which determines the quality of saved JPEG images as a value from 1 to 100, has been renamed to WAGTAILIMAGES_JPEG_QUALITY. If you have used this setting, please update your settings file accordingly.