Wagtail 1.8 (LTS) release notes

December 15, 2016

Wagtail 1.8 is designated a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Long Term Support releases will continue to receive maintenance updates as necessary to address security and data-loss related issues, up until the next LTS release (typically a period of 8 months).

What’s new

New page privacy options

../_images/releasenotes_1_8_pageprivacy.png

Access to pages can now be restricted based on user accounts and group membership, rather than just through a shared password. This makes it possible to set up intranet-style sites via the admin, with no additional coding. This feature was developed by Shawn Makinson, Tom Miller, Luca Perico and Matt Westcott.

See: Private pages

Restrictions on bulk-deletion of pages

Previously, any user with edit permission over a page and its descendants was able to delete them all as a single action, which led to the risk of accidental deletions. To guard against this, the permission rules have been revised so that a user with basic permissions can only delete pages that have no children; in order to delete a whole subtree, they must individually delete each child page first. A new “bulk delete” permission type has been added which allows a user to delete pages with children, as before; superusers receive this permission implicitly, and so there is no change of behaviour for them.

This feature was developed by Matt Westcott.

Elasticsearch 5 support

Wagtail now supports Elasticsearch 5. See Elasticsearch Backend for configuration details. This feature was developed by Karl Hobley.

Permission-limited admin breadcrumb

Breadcrumb links within the admin are now limited to the portion of the page tree that covers all pages the user has permission over. As with the changes to the explorer sidebar menu in Wagtail 1.6, this is a step towards supporting full multi-tenancy (where multiple sites on the same Wagtail installation can be fully isolated from each other through permission configuration). This feature was developed by Jeffrey Chau, Robert Rollins and Matt Westcott.

Updated tutorial

The “Your first Wagtail site” tutorial has been extensively updated to cover concepts such as dynamic page listings, template context variables, and tagging. This update was contributed by Scot Hacker, with additions from Matt Westcott.

Other features

  • Added support of a custom edit_handler for site settings. See docs for the site settings module. (Axel Haustant)

  • Added get_landing_page_template getter method to AbstractForm (Gagaro)

  • Added Page.get_admin_display_title method to override how the title is displayed in the admin (Henk-Jan van Hasselaar)

  • Added support for specifying custom HTML attributes for table rows on ModelAdmin index pages. (Andy Babic)

  • Added first_common_ancestor method to PageQuerySet (Tim Heap)

  • Page chooser now opens at the deepest ancestor page that covers all the pages of the required page type (Tim Heap)

  • PageChooserBlock now accepts a target_model option to specify the required page type (Tim Heap)

  • Modeladmin forms now respect fields / exclude options passed on custom model forms (Thejaswi Puthraya)

  • Added new StreamField block type StaticBlock for blocks that occupy a position in a stream but otherwise have no configuration; see StaticBlock (Benoît Vogel)

  • Added new StreamField block type BlockQuoteBlock (Scot Hacker)

  • Updated Cloudflare cache module to use the v4 API (Albert O’Connor)

  • Added exclude_from_explorer attribute to the ModelAdmin class to allow hiding instances of a page type from Wagtail’s explorer views (Andy Babic)

  • Added above_login, below_login, fields and login_form customisation blocks to the login page template - see Customizing admin templates (Tim Heap)

  • ChoiceBlock now accepts a callable as the choices list (Mikalai Radchuk)

  • Redundant action buttons are now omitted from the root page in the explorer (Nick Smith)

  • Locked pages are now disabled from editing at the browser level (Edd Baldry)

  • Added wagtail.core.query.PageQuerySet.in_site() method for filtering page QuerySets to pages within the specified site (Chris Rogers)

  • Added the ability to override the default index settings for Elasticsearch. See Elasticsearch Backend (PyMan Claudio Marinozzi)

  • Extra options for the Elasticsearch constructor should be now defined with the new key OPTIONS of the WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS setting (PyMan Claudio Marinozzi)

Bug fixes

  • AbstractForm now respects custom get_template methods on the page model (Gagaro)

  • Use specific page model for the parent page in the explore index (Gagaro)

  • Remove responsive styles in embed when there is no ratio available (Gagaro)

  • Parent page link in page search modal no longer disappears on hover (Dan Braghis)

  • ModelAdmin views now consistently call get_context_data (Andy Babic)

  • Header for search results on the redirects index page now shows the correct count when the listing is paginated (Nick Smith)

  • set_url_paths management command is now compatible with Django 1.10 (Benjamin Bach)

  • Form builder email notifications now output multiple values correctly (Sævar Öfjörð Magnússon)

  • Closing ‘more’ dropdown on explorer no longer jumps to the top of the page (Ducky)

  • Users with only publish permission are no longer given implicit permission to delete pages (Matt Westcott)

  • search_garbage_collect management command now works when wagtailsearchpromotions is not installed (Morgan Aubert)

  • wagtail.contrib.settings context processor no longer fails when request.site is unavailable (Diederik van der Boor)

  • TableBlock content is now indexed for search (Morgan Aubert)

  • Page.copy() is now marked as alters_data, to prevent template code from triggering it (Diederik van der Boor)

Upgrade considerations

unique_together constraint on custom image rendition models needs updating

If your project is using a custom image model (see Custom image models), you will need to update the unique_together option on the corresponding Rendition model when upgrading to Wagtail 1.8. Change the line:

unique_together = (
    ('image', 'filter', 'focal_point_key'),
)

to:

unique_together = (
    ('image', 'filter_spec', 'focal_point_key'),
)

You will then be able to run manage.py makemigrations and manage.py migrate as normal.

Additionally, third-party code that accesses the Filter and Rendition models directly should note the following and make updates where applicable:

  • Filter will no longer be a Django model as of Wagtail 1.9, and as such, ORM operations on it (such as save() and Filter.objects) are deprecated. It should be instantiated and used as an in-memory object instead - for example, flt, created = Filter.objects.get_or_create(spec='fill-100x100') should become flt = Filter(spec='fill-100x100').

  • The filter field of Rendition models is no longer in use; lookups should instead be performed on the filter_spec field, which contains a filter spec string such as 'fill-100x100'.

wagtail.wagtailimages.models.get_image_model has moved

The get_image_model function should now be imported from wagtail.wagtailimages rather than wagtail.wagtailimages.models. See Referring to the image model.

Non-administrators now need ‘bulk delete’ permission to delete pages with children

As a precaution against accidental data loss, this release introduces a new “bulk delete” permission on pages, which can be set through the Settings -> Groups area. Non-administrator users must have this permission in order to delete pages that have children; a user without this permission would have to delete each child individually before deleting the parent. By default, no groups are assigned this new permission. If you wish to restore the previous behaviour, and don’t want to configure permissions manually through the admin interface, you can do so with a data migration. Create an empty migration using ./manage.py makemigrations myapp --empty --name assign_bulk_delete_permission (replacing myapp with the name of one of your project’s apps) and edit the migration file to contain the following:

from __future__ import unicode_literals

from django.db import migrations


def add_bulk_delete_permission(apps, schema_editor):
    """Find all groups with add/edit page permissions, and assign them bulk_delete permission"""
    GroupPagePermission = apps.get_model('wagtailcore', 'GroupPagePermission')
    for group_id, page_id in GroupPagePermission.objects.filter(
        permission_type__in=['add', 'edit']
    ).values_list('group', 'page').distinct():
        GroupPagePermission.objects.create(
            group_id=group_id, page_id=page_id, permission_type='bulk_delete'
        )


def remove_bulk_delete_permission(apps, schema_editor):
    GroupPagePermission = apps.get_model('wagtailcore', 'GroupPagePermission')
    GroupPagePermission.objects.filter(permission_type='bulk_delete').delete()


class Migration(migrations.Migration):

    dependencies = [
        # keep the original dependencies line
    ]

    operations = [
        migrations.RunPython(add_bulk_delete_permission, remove_bulk_delete_permission),
    ]

Cloudflare cache module now requires a ZONEID setting

The wagtail.contrib.wagtailfrontendcache.backends.CloudflareBackend module has been updated to use Cloudflare’s v4 API, replacing the previous v1 implementation (which is unsupported as of November 9th, 2016). The new API requires users to supply a zone identifier, which should be passed as the ZONEID field of the WAGTAILFRONTENDCACHE setting:

WAGTAILFRONTENDCACHE = {
    'cloudflare': {
        'BACKEND': 'wagtail.contrib.wagtailfrontendcache.backends.CloudflareBackend',
        'EMAIL': 'your-cloudflare-email-address@example.com',
        'TOKEN': 'your cloudflare api token',
        'ZONEID': 'your cloudflare domain zone id',
    },
}

For details of how to obtain the zone identifier, see the Cloudflare API documentation.

Extra options for the Elasticsearch constructor should be now defined with the new key OPTIONS of the WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS setting

For the Elasticsearch backend, all extra keys defined in WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS are passed directly to the Elasticsearch constructor. All these keys now should be moved inside the new OPTIONS dictionary. The old behaviour is still supported, but deprecated.

For example, the following configuration changes the connection class that the Elasticsearch connector uses:

from elasticsearch import RequestsHttpConnection

WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'wagtail.wagtailsearch.backends.elasticsearch',
        'connection_class': RequestsHttpConnection,
    }
}

As connection_class needs to be passed through to the Elasticsearch connector, it should be moved to the new OPTIONS dictionary:

from elasticsearch import RequestsHttpConnection

WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS = {
    'default': {
        'BACKEND': 'wagtail.wagtailsearch.backends.elasticsearch',
        'OPTIONS': {
            'connection_class': RequestsHttpConnection,
        }
    }
}