Wagtail 5.2 (LTS) release notes¶

Redesigned page listing view¶

The page explorer listing view has been redesigned to allow improved navigation and searching. This feature was developed by Ben Enright, Matt Westcott, Thibaud Colas and Sage Abdullah.

OpenSearch support¶

OpenSearch is now formally supported as an alternative to Elasticsearch. For configuration details, see OpenSearch configuration. This feature was developed by Matt Westcott.

Responsive & multi-format images with the picture tag¶

Wagtail has new template tags to reduce the loading time and environmental footprint of images:

• The picture tag generates images in multiple formats and-or sizes in one batch, creating an HTML <picture> tag.

• The srcset_image tag generates images in multiple sizes, creating an <img> tag with a srcset attribute.

As an example, the picture tag allows generating six variants of an image in one go:

{% picture page.photo format-{avif,webp,jpeg} width-{400,800} sizes="80vw" %}

This outputs:

<picture>
    <source sizes="80vw" srcset="/media/images/pied-wagtail.width-400.avif 400w, /media/images/pied-wagtail.width-800.avif 800w" type="image/avif">
    <source sizes="80vw" srcset="/media/images/pied-wagtail.width-400.webp 400w, /media/images/pied-wagtail.width-800.webp 800w" type="image/webp">
    <img sizes="80vw" srcset="/media/images/pied-wagtail.width-400.jpg 400w, /media/images/pied-wagtail.width-800.jpg 800w" src="/media/images/pied-wagtail.width-400.jpg" alt="A pied Wagtail" width="400" height="300">
</picture>

We expect those changes to greatly reduce the weight of images for all Wagtail sites. We encourage all site implementers to consider using them to improve the performance of the sites and reduce their carbon footprint. For further details, For more details, see Multiple formats and Responsive images. Those new template tags are also supported in Jinja templates, see Jinja2 template support for the Jinja API.

This feature was developed by Paarth Agarwal and Thibaud Colas as part of the Google Summer of Code program and a partnership with the Green Web Foundation and Green Coding Berlin, with support from Dan Braghiș, Thibaud Colas, Sage Abdullah, Arne Tarara (Green Coding Berlin), and Chris Adams (Green Web Foundation). We also thank Aman Pandey for introducing AVIF support in Wagtail 5.1, Andy Babic for creating AbstractImage.get_renditions() in the same release; and Storm Heg, Mitchel Cabuloy, Coen van der Kamp, Tom Dyson, and Chris Lawton for their feedback on RFC 71.

Support extending Wagtail client-side with Stimulus¶

Wagtail now officially supports client-side admin customizations with Stimulus. The developer documentation has a dedicated page about Extending client-side behavior. This covers fundamental topics of client-side extensibility, such as:

• Adding custom JavaScript

• Extending with DOM events and Wagtail’s custom DOM events

• Extending with Stimulus

• Extending with React

Thank you to core contributor LB (Ben) Johnston for writing this documentation.

ModelViewSet improvements¶

Several features from SnippetViewSet have been implemented in ModelViewSet, allowing you to use them without registering your models as snippets. For more details on using ModelViewSet, refer to Generic views.

• Move SnippetViewSet menu registration mechanism to base ViewSet class (Sage Abdullah)

• Move SnippetViewSet template override mechanism to ModelViewSet (Sage Abdullah)

• Move SnippetViewSet.list_display to ModelViewSet (Sage Abdullah)

• Move list_filter, filterset_class, search_fields, search_backend_name, list_export, export_filename, list_per_page, and ordering from SnippetViewSet to ModelViewSet (Sage Abdullah, Cynthia Kiser)

• Add default header titles to generic IndexView and CreateView (Sage Abdullah)

• Add the ability to use filters and to export listings in generic IndexView (Sage Abdullah)

• Add generic UsageView to ModelViewSet (Sage Abdullah)

• Add generic InspectView to ModelViewSet (Sage Abdullah)

• Extract generic HistoryView from snippets and add it to ModelViewSet (Sage Abdullah)

• Extract generic breadcrumbs functionality from page breadcrumbs (Sage Abdullah)

• Add breadcrumbs support to custom ModelViewSet views (Sage Abdullah)

• Allow ModelViewSet to be used with models that have non-integer primary keys (Sage Abdullah)

• Enable reference index tracking for models registered with ModelViewSet (Sage Abdullah)

In addition, the following new features have been added to the generic admin views as part of ModelViewSet, which can also be used with SnippetViewSet.

• Allow overriding IndexView.export_headings via ModelViewSet (Christer Jensen, Sage Abdullah)

• Add the ability to define listing buttons on generic IndexView (Sage Abdullah)

User interface refinements¶

Several tweaks have been made to the admin user interface which we hope will make it easier to use.

• Show the full first published at date within a tooltip on the Page status sidebar on the relative date (Rohit Sharma)

• Do not render minimap if there are no panel anchors (Sage Abdullah)

• Use dropdown buttons on listings in dashboard panels (Sage Abdullah)

• Implement breadcrumbs design refinements (Thibaud Colas)

• Add support for Shift + Click behaviour in form submissions and simple translations submissions (LB (Ben) Johnston)

• Improve filtering of audit logging based on the user’s permissions (Stefan Hammer)

External links in promoted search results¶

Promoted search result entries can now use an external URL along with custom link text, instead of linking to a page within Wagtail. This makes it easier to manage promoted content across multiple websites. Thank you to TopDevPros, and Brad Busenius from University of Chicago Library.

Other features¶

• Add support for Python 3.12 (Matt Westcott)

• Add wagtailcache and wagtailpagecache template tags to ensure previewing Pages or Snippets will not be cached (Jake Howard)

• Always set help text element ID for form fields with help text in field.html template (Sage Abdullah)

• When copying a page or creating an alias, copy its view restrictions to the destination (Sandeep Choudhary, Suyash Singh)

• Support pickling of StreamField values (pySilver)

• Remove wagtail.publish log action on aliases when they are created from live source pages or the source page is published (Dan Braghis)

• Remove wagtail.unpublish log action on aliases when source page is unpublished (Dan Braghis)

• Add compare buttons to workflow dashboard panel (Matt Westcott)

• Support specifying a get_object_list method on ChooserViewSet (Matt Westcott)

• Add linked_fields mechanism on chooser widgets to allow choices to be limited by fields on the calling page (Matt Westcott)

• Add support for merging cells within TableBlock with the mergedCells option (Gareth Palmer)

• When adding a panel within InlinePanel, focus will now shift to that content similar to StreamField (Faishal Manzar)

• Add support for placement in human_readable_date the tooltip template tag (Rohit Sharma)

• Support passing extra context variables via the {% component %} tag (Matt Westcott)

• Allow subclasses of PagesAPIViewSet override default Page model via the model attribute (Neeraj Yetheendran, Herbert Poul)

• Add support for subject and body in the Email link chooser form (TopDevPros, Alexandre Joly)

• Add a visual progress bar to the output of the wagtail_update_image_renditions management command (Faishal Manzar)

• Increase the read buffer size to improve efficiency and performance when generating file hashes for document or image uploads, use hashlib.file_digest if available (Python 3.11+) (Jake Howard)

• API ordering now supports multiple fields (Rohit Sharma, Jake Howard)

• Pass block value to Block.get_template to allow varying template based on value (Florian Delizy)

• Add InlinePanel DOM events for when ready and when items added or removed (Faishal Manzar)

• Support Filter instances as input for AbstractImage.get_renditions() (Thibaud Colas)

• Improve error messages for image template tags (Thibaud Colas)

• The purge_revisions management command now respects revisions that have an on_delete=PROTECT foreign key relation and won’t delete them (Neeraj P Yetheendran, Meghana Reddy, Sage Abdullah, Storm Heg)

Bug fixes¶

• Ensure that StreamField’s FieldBlocks correctly set the required and aria-describedby attributes (Storm Heg)

• Avoid an error when the moderation panel (admin dashboard) contains both snippets and private pages (Matt Westcott)

• When deleting collections, ensure the collection name is correctly shown in the success message (LB (Ben) Johnston)

• Filter out comments on Page editing counts that do not correspond to a valid field / block path on the page such as when a field has been removed (Matt Westcott)

• Allow PublishMenuItem to more easily support overriding its label via construct_page_action_menu (Sébastien Corbin)

• Allow locale selection when creating a page at the root level (Sage Abdullah)

• Ensure the admin login template correctly displays all non_fields_errors for any custom form validation (Sébastien Corbin)

• Ensure ‘mark as active’ label in workflow bulk action set active form can be translated (Rohit Sharma)

• Ensure the panel title for a user’s settings correctly reflects the WAGTAIL_EMAIL_MANAGEMENT_ENABLED setting by not showing ‘email’ if disabled (Omkar Jadhav)

• Update Spotify oEmbed provider URL parsing to resolve correctly (Dhrűv)

• Update link colors within help blocks to meet accessible contrast requirements (Rohit Sharma)

• Ensure the search promotions popular search terms picker correctly refers to the correct model (LB (Ben) Johnston)

• Correctly quote non-numeric primary keys on snippet inspect view (Sage Abdullah)

• Prevent crash on snippet inspect view when displaying a null foreign key to an image (Sage Abdullah)

• Ensure that pages in moderation show as “Live + In Moderation” in the page explorer rather than “Live + Draft” (Sage Abdullah)

• Prevent error when updating reference index for objects with a lazy ParentalKey-related object (Chris Shaw)

• Ignore conflicts when inserting reference index entries to prevent race conditions causing uniqueness errors (Chris Shaw)

• Populate the correct return value when creating a new snippet within the snippet chooser (claudobahn)

• Reinstate missing filter by page type on page search (Matt Westcott)

• Ensure very long words can wrap when viewing saved comments (Chiemezuo Akujobi)

• Avoid forgotten password link text conflicting with the supplied aria-label (Thibaud Colas)

• Fix log message to record the correct restriction type when removing a page view restriction (Rohit Sharma, Hazh. M. Adam)

• Avoid potential race condition with new Page subscriptions on the edit view (Alex Tomkins)

• Use the correct action log when creating a redirect (Thibaud Colas)

• Ensure that all password fields consistently allow leading & trailing whitespace (Neeraj P Yetheendran)

Documentation¶

• Expand documentation on using ViewSet and ModelViewSet (Sage Abdullah)

• Document WAGTAILADMIN_BASE_URL on “Integrating Wagtail into a Django project” page (Shreshth Srivastava)

• Replace incorrect screenshot for authors listing on tutorial (Shreshth Srivastava)

• Add documentation for building non-model-based choosers using the queryish library (Matt Westcott)

• Fix incorrect tag library import on focal points example (Hatim Makki Hoho)

• Add reminder about including your custom Draftail feature in any overridden WAGTAILADMIN_RICH_TEXT_EDITORS setting (Charlie Sue)

• Mention the need to install python3-venv on Ubuntu (Brian Mugo)

• Document the use of the Google developer documentation style guide in documentation (Damilola Oladele)

• Fix Inconsistent URL Format in Getting Started tutorial (Olumide Micheal)

• Add more extensive documentation for the permission kwarg support in Panels (LB (Ben) Johnston)

• Update all FieldPanel('title') examples to use the recommended TitleFieldPanel('title') panel (Chinedu Ihedioha)

Maintenance¶

Legacy moderation system is deprecated¶

The legacy moderation system, which was replaced by the new workflow system in Wagtail 2.10, is now deprecated. Since Wagtail 2.10, submitting a page for moderation will use the new workflow system. However, the legacy moderation system is still in place for approving and rejecting pages that were submitted for moderation before Wagtail 2.10.

To view all pages that are still in the legacy moderation system backlog, you can sign in as a superuser and see if there is a “Pages awaiting moderation” section in the admin dashboard. You can approve or reject the pages from there. You can also do this programmatically by querying for Revision.objects.filter(submitted_for_moderation=True) and calling revision.approve_moderation() or revision.reject_moderation() on each revision.

The legacy moderation system will be removed in a future release. If you still have pages in the moderation queue that were submitted for moderation before Wagtail 2.10, you should approve or reject them before upgrading. See Wagtail 2.10 release notes for more details.

As a result, the following features are now deprecated:

• wagtail.models.Revision.submitted_for_moderation

• wagtail.models.Revision.submitted_revisions

• wagtail.models.Revision.approve_moderation()

• wagtail.models.Revision.reject_moderation()

• The submitted_for_moderation argument in wagtail.models.RevisionMixin.save_revision()

• WAGTAIL_MODERATION_ENABLED

• wagtail.admin.userbar.ModeratePageItem

• wagtail.admin.userbar.ApproveModerationEditPageItem

• wagtail.admin.userbar.RejectModerationEditPageItem

• wagtail.admin.views.home.PagesForModerationPanel

• wagtail.admin.views.pages.moderation

• wagtail.permission_policies.pages.PagePermissionPolicy.revisions_for_moderation

If you use any of the above features, remove them or replace them with the equivalent features from the new workflow system. The above features will be removed in a future release.

Adoption of classname convention for MenuItem related classes and hooks¶

Wagtail MenuItem and menu hooks have been updated to use the more consistent naming of classname (singular) instead of classnames (plural), a convention that started in Wagtail 4.2.

The current classnames keyword argument naming will be supported, but will trigger a deprecation warning. Support for this variant will be removed in a future release.

The following classes will adopt this new convention.

• admin.menu.MenuItem

• admin.ui.sidebar.ActionMenuItem

• admin.ui.sidebar.LinkMenuItem

• admin.ui.sidebar.PageExplorerMenuItem

• contrib.settings.registry.SettingMenuItem

The following hooks usage may be impacted if classnames were used when generating menu items.

• register_admin_menu_item

• register_settings_menu_item

from django.urls import reverse

from wagtail import hooks
from wagtail.admin.menu import MenuItem

@hooks.register('register_admin_menu_item')
def register_frank_menu_item():
  return MenuItem(
    'Frank',
    reverse('frank'),
    icon_name='folder-inverse',
    order=10000,
    classname="highlight-menu" # not classnames=...
  )

Edit and delete URLs in ModelViewSet changed to allow non-integer primary keys¶

To accommodate models with non-integer primary keys, the URL patterns for the edit and delete views in ModelViewSet have been changed.

Relative to the viewset’s url_prefix, the following changes have been made:

• The edit URL pattern has been changed from <int:pk>/ to edit/<str:pk>/

• The delete URL pattern has been changed from <int:pk>/delete/ to delete/<str:pk>/

If you use reverse() with get_url_name() to generate the URLs for these views, no changes are needed. However, if you have hard-coded these URLs in your code, you will need to update them to match the new patterns.

Redirects for the legacy URLs are in place for backwards compatibility, but will be removed in a future release.

The URLs for snippets underwent similar changes in Wagtail 2.14. The redirects for the legacy URLs in SnippetViewSet have now been marked for removal in a future release.

ModelViewSet automatically registers the model to the reference index¶

Models that are registered with a ModelViewSet now have reference index tracking enabled by default. This means that you no longer need to call ReferenceIndex.register_model() in your app’s ready() method for such models. If this is undesired, you can disable it by setting add_to_reference_index to False on the ModelViewSet subclass. For more details, see Managing the Reference Index.

Groups IndexView.results_template_name renamed from results.html to index_results.html¶

The IndexView’s results_template_name attribute in the GroupViewSet has been renamed from wagtailusers/groups/results.html to wagtailusers/groups/index_results.html for consistency with the other viewsets. If you have customized or extended the template, e.g. for Customizing group edit/create views, you will need to rename it to match the new name.

construct_snippet_listing_buttons hook no longer accepts a context argument¶

The construct_snippet_listing_buttons hook no longer accepts a context argument. If you have implemented this hook, you will need to remove the context argument from your implementation. If you need to access values computed by the view, you’ll need to override the index_view_class with a custom IndexView subclass. The get_list_buttons and get_list_more_buttons methods in particular may be overridden to customize the buttons on the listing.

Defining a function for this hook that accepts the context argument will raise a warning, and the function will receive an empty dictionary ({}) as the context. Support for defining the context argument will be completely removed in a future Wagtail release.

Hooks for page listing and page header buttons no longer accept a page_perms argument¶

The arguments passed to the hooks register_page_header_buttons, register_page_listing_buttons, construct_page_listing_buttons and register_page_listing_more_buttons have changed. For all of these hooks, the page_perms argument has been replaced by user; in addition, register_page_header_buttons is now passed a view_name argument, which is either 'edit' or 'index', depending on whether the button is being generated for the page listing or edit view. In summary, the changes are:

• register_page_header_buttons: Previously func(page, page_perms, next_url), now func(page, user, next_url, view_name).

• register_page_listing_buttons: Previously func(page, page_perms, next_url), now func(page, user, next_url).

• construct_page_listing_buttons: Previously func(buttons, page, page_perms, context), now fn(buttons, page, user, context).

• register_page_listing_more_buttons: Previously func(page, page_perms, next_url), now func(page, user, next_url).

Additionally, the ButtonWithDropdownFromHook constructor, and the resulting hook it creates, should now be passed a user argument instead of page_perms.

Existing code that performs permission checks using page_perms can retrieve the same permission tester object using page.permissions_for_user(user).

Hook functions using the old page_perms signature will continue to work, but this is deprecated and will raise a warning. Support for the old signature will be removed in a future Wagtail release.

Breadcrumbs class name has changed¶

If using custom styling for the breadcrumbs, this class has changed from singular to plural for a more intuitive class.

Snippets templates refactored to reuse the shared slim_header.html template¶

The templates for the snippets views have been refactored to reuse the shared slim_header.html template. If you have customized or extended the templates, e.g. for Customizing admin views for snippets, you will need to update them to match the new structure. As a result, the following templates have been removed:

• wagtailsnippets/snippets/headers/_base_header.html

• wagtailsnippets/snippets/headers/create_header.html

• wagtailsnippets/snippets/headers/edit_header.html

• wagtailsnippets/snippets/headers/history_header.html

• wagtailsnippets/snippets/headers/list_header.html

• wagtailsnippets/snippets/headers/usage_header.html

In most cases, the usage of those templates can be replaced with the wagtailadmin/shared/headers/slim_header.html template. Refer to the snippets views and templates code for more details.

BaseSidePanels, PageSidePanels and SnippetSidePanels classes are removed¶

The BaseSidePanels, PageSidePanels and SnippetSidePanels classes that were used to combine the side panels (i.e. status, preview and comments side panels) have been removed. Each side panel is now instantiated directly in the view. The wagtail.admin.ui.components.MediaContainer class can be used to combine the Media objects for the side panels.

The BasePreviewSidePanel, PagePreviewSidePanel and SnippetPreviewSidePanel classes have been replaced with the consolidated PreviewSidePanel class.

The BaseStatusSidePanel class has been renamed to StatusSidePanel.

If you use these classes in your code, you will need to update your code to instantiate the side panels directly in the view.

For example, if you have the following code:

from wagtail.admin.ui.side_panels import PageSidePanels


def my_view(request):
    ...

    side_panels = PageSidePanels(
        request,
        page.get_latest_revision_as_object(),
        show_schedule_publishing_toggle=False,
        live_page=page,
        scheduled_page=page.get_scheduled_revision_as_object(),
        in_explorer=False,
        preview_enabled=True,
        comments_enabled=False,
    )

    return render(
        request,
        template_name,
        {"page": page, "side_panels": side_panels, "media": side_panels.media},
    )

Update it to the following:

from wagtail.admin.ui.components import MediaContainer
from wagtail.admin.ui.side_panels import PageStatusSidePanel, PreviewSidePanel


def my_view(request):
    ...

    side_panels = [
        PageStatusSidePanel(
            page,
            request,
            show_schedule_publishing_toggle=False,
            live_object=page,
            scheduled_object=page.get_scheduled_revision_as_object(),
            locale=page.locale,
            translations=translations,
        ),
        PreviewSidePanel(
            page,
            request,
            preview_url=reverse("wagtailadmin_pages:preview_on_edit", args=[page.id]),
        ),
    ]
    side_panels = MediaContainer(side_panels)

    return render(
        request,
        template_name,
        {"page": page, "side_panels": side_panels, "media": side_panels.media},
    )

Breadcrumbs now use different data attributes and events¶

The undocumented JavaScript implementation for the header breadcrumbs component has been migrated to a Stimulus controller and now uses different data attributes.

This may impact custom header implementations that relied on the previous approach, custom breadcrumbs that did not use breadcrumbs and require the expand/collapse behavior may be impacted.

data-controller="w-breadcrumbs"
data-action="keyup.esc@document->w-breadcrumbs#close w-breadcrumbs:open@document->w-breadcrumbs#open w-breadcrumbs:close@document->w-breadcrumbs#close"
data-w-breadcrumbs-close-icon-class="icon-cross"
data-w-breadcrumbs-closed-value="true"
data-w-breadcrumbs-open-icon-class="icon-breadcrumb-expand"
data-w-breadcrumbs-opened-content-class="w-max-w-4xl"
data-w-breadcrumbs-peek-target-value="header"

window.updateFooterSaveWarning global util removed¶

The undocumented global util window.updateFooterSaveWarning has been removed, this is part of the footer ‘unsaved’ messages toggling behavior on page forms. This behavior has now moved to a Stimulus controller and leverages DOM events instead. Calling this function will do nothing and in a future release will throw an error.

You can implement roughly the equivalent functionality with this JavaScript function, however, this will not be guaranteed to work in future releases.

window.updateFooterSaveWarning = (formDirty, commentsDirty) => {
  if (!formDirty && !commentsDirty) {
    document.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent('w-unsaved:clear'));
  } else {
    const [type] = [
      formDirty && commentsDirty && 'all',
      commentsDirty && 'comments',
      formDirty && 'edits',
    ].filter(Boolean);
    document.dispatchEvent(new CustomEvent('w-unsaved:add', { detail: { type } }));
  }
};

dropdown template tag argument toggle_tippy_offset renamed to toggle_tooltip_offset¶

The naming conventions for tippy related attributes have been updated to align with the generic tooltip naming.

If you are using the undocumented dropdown template tag with the offset arg, this will need to be updated.

escapescript template tag and escape_script functions are deprecated¶

As of this release, the undocumented coreutils.escape_script util and escapescript template tag will no longer be supported.

This was used to provide a way for HTML template content in IE11, which is no longer supported, and was non-compliant with CSP support.

The current approach will trigger a deprecation warning and will be removed in a future release.

{% load wagtailadmin_tags %}
<script type="text/django-form-template" id="id_{{ formset.prefix }}-EMPTY_FORM_TEMPLATE">
    {% escapescript %}
        <div>Widget template content</div>
        <script src="/js/my-widget.js"></script>
    {% endescapescript %}
</script>

<template id="id_{{ formset.prefix }}-EMPTY_FORM_TEMPLATE">
    <div>Widget template content</div>
    <script src="/js/my-widget.js"></script>
</template>

Adoption of classname convention within the Image Format instance¶

When using wagtail.images.formats.Format, the created instance set the argument for classes to the attribute classnames (plural), this has now changed to classname (singular).

For any custom code that accessed or modified this undocumented attribute, updates will need to be made as follows.

Accessing self.classnames will still work until a future release, simply returning self.classname, but this will raise a deprecation warning.

# image_formats.py
from django.utils.html import format_html
from wagtail.images.formats import Format, register_image_format


class CustomImageFormat(Format):

    def image_to_html(self, image, alt_text, extra_attributes=None):
        # contrived example - pull out the class and render on outside element
        classname = self.classname # not self.classnames
        self.classname = "" # not self.classnames
        inner_html = super().image_to_html(image, alt_text, extra_attributes)
        return format_html("<custom-image class='{}'>{}</custom-image>", classname, inner_html)


custom_format = CustomImageFormat('custom_example', 'Custom example', 'example-image object-fit', 'width-750')

register_image_format(custom_format)

Changes to search promotions contrib module¶

Block.get_template now accepts a value argument¶

The get_template method on StreamField blocks now accepts a value argument in addition to context. Code using the old signature should be updated:

# Old
def get_template(self, context=None):
    ...

# New
def get_template(self, value=None, context=None):
    ...