Wagtail 6.0 release notes¶

Django 5.0 support¶

This release adds support for Django 5.0. The support has also been backported to Wagtail 5.2 LTS.

New developer tutorial¶

A new developer tutorial series has been added to the documentation. This series builds upon the pre-existing Your first Wagtail site, going through the creation and deployment of a portfolio website.

This tutorial series was created by Damilola Oladele as part of the Google Season of Docs program, with support from Meagen Voss, and Thibaud Colas. We also thank Storm Heg, Kalob Taulien, Kátia Nakamura, Mariusz Felisiak, and Rachel Smith for their support and feedback as part of the project.

Universal listings¶

Following design improvements to the page listing view, Wagtail now provides a unified search and filtering interface for all listings. This will improve navigation capabilities, particularly for sites with a large number of pages or where content tends to use a flat structure.

In this release, the universal listing interface is available for Pages, Snippets, and Forms. For pages, the UI includes the following filters out of the box:

• Page type

• Date updated

• Owner

• Edited by

• Site

• Has child pages

• Locale

This feature was developed by Ben Enright, Matt Westcott, Nick Lee, Thibaud Colas, and Sage Abdullah.

Right-to-left language support¶

The admin interface now supports right-to-left languages, such as Persian, Arabic, and Hebrew. Though there are still some areas that need improvement, all admin views will now be displayed in the correct direction. Review our UI guidelines for guidance on supporting right-to-left languages in admin interface customizations.

Thank you to Thibaud Colas, Badr Fourane, and Sage Abdullah for their work on this long-requested improvement.

Accessibility checker in page editor¶

The built-in accessibility checker now displays as a side panel within page and snippet editors supporting preview. The new “Checks” side panel only shows accessibility-related issues for pages with the userbar enabled in this release, but will be updated to support any content checks in the future.

This feature was implemented by Nick Lee, Thibaud Colas, and Sage Abdullah.

Page types usage report¶

The new Page types report provides a breakdown of the number of pages for each type. It helps answer questions such as:

• Which page types do we have on our CMS?

• How many pages of that page type do we have?

• When was a page of that type last edited? By whom? Which page was that?

This feature was developed by Jhonatan Lopes, as part of a sponsorship by the Mozilla Foundation.

Accessibility improvements¶

This release comes with a high number of accessibility improvements across the admin interface.

• Improve layout and accessibility of the image URL generator page, reduce reliance on JavaScript (Temidayo Azeez)

• Remove overly verbose image captions in image listings for screen readers (Sage Abdullah)

• Ensure screen readers and dictation tools can more easily navigate bulk actions in images, documents and page listings by streamlining labels and descriptions (Sage Abdullah)

• Add optional caption field to TypedTableBlock (Tommaso Amici, Cynthia Kiser)

• Switch the TableBlock header controls to a field that requires user input (Bhuvnesh Sharma, Aman Pandey, Cynthia Kiser)

• Add support for caption on admin UI Table component (Aman Pandey)

• Replace legacy dropdown component with new Tippy dropdown-button (Thibaud Colas)

• Ensure the sidebar account toggle has no duplicate accessible labels (Nandini Arora)

• Ensure that page listing re-ordering messages and accessible labels can be translated (Aman Pandey, LB (Ben) Johnston)

• Resolve multiple issues with page listing re-ordering using keyboard and screen readers (Aman Pandey)

• When using an empty table header (th) for visual spacing, ensure this is ignored by accessibility tooling (V Rohitansh)

• Ensure that TableBlock cells are accessible when using keyboard control only (Elhussein Almasri)

Other features¶

• Added search_index option to StreamField blocks to control whether the block is indexed for searching (Vedant Pandey)

• Remember previous location on returning from page add/edit actions (Robert Rollins)

• Update settings file in project settings to address Django 4.2 deprecations (Sage Abdullah)

• Allow UniqueConstraint in place of unique_together for TranslatableMixin’s system check (Temidayo Azeez, Sage Abdullah)

• Make use of IndexView.get_add_url() in snippets index view template (Christer Jensen, Sage Abdullah)

• Allow Page.permissions_for_user() to be overridden by specific page types (Sébastien Corbin)

• Improve visual alignment of explore icon in Page listings for longer content (Krzysztof Jeziorny)

• Add extra_actions blocks to Snippets and generic index templates (Bhuvnesh Sharma)

• Add support for defining panels / edit_handler on ModelViewSet (Sage Abdullah)

• Use a single instance of PagePermissionPolicy in wagtail.permissions module (Sage Abdullah)

• Add max tag length validation for multiple uploads (documents/images) (Temidayo Azeez)

• Ensure expanded side panel does not overlap form content for most viewports (Chiemezuo Akujobi)

• Add ability to modify the default ordering for the page explorer view (Shlomo Markowitz)

• Remove support for Safari 14 (Thibaud Colas)

• Add ability to click to copy the URL in the image URL generator page (Sai Srikar Dumpeti)

• Show edit as a main action in generic history and usage views (Sage Abdullah)

• Make styles for header buttons consistent (Sage Abdullah)

• Improve styles of slim header’s search and filters (Sage Abdullah)

• Change page listing’s add button to icon-only (Sage Abdullah)

• Add sublabel to breadcrumbs, including history, usage, and inspect views (Sage Abdullah)

• Standardise search form placeholder to ‘Search…’ (Sage Abdullah)

• Use SlugInput on all SlugFields by default (LB (Ben) Johnston)

• Show character counts on RichTextBlock with max_length (Elhussein Almasri)

• Move locale selector in generic IndexView to a filter (Sage Abdullah)

• Add ability to customise a page’s copy form including an auto-incrementing slug example (Neeraj Yetheendran)

• Add WAGTAILADMIN_LOGIN_URL setting to allow customising the login URL (Neeraj Yetheendran)

• Polish dark theme styles and update color tokens (Thibaud Colas, Rohit Sharma)

• Keep database state of pages and snippets updated while in draft state (Stefan Hammer)

• Add DrilldownController and w-drilldown component to support drilldown menus (Thibaud Colas)

• Add API support for a redirects (contrib) endpoint (Rohit Sharma, Jaap Roes, Andreas Donig)

• Add the default ability for all SnippetViewSet & ModelViewSet to support being copied, this can be disabled by copy_view_enabled = False (Shlomo Markowitz)

• Support dynamic Wagtail guide links in the admin that are based on the running version of Wagtail (Tidiane Dia)

Bug fixes¶

• Update system check for overwriting storage backends to recognize the STORAGES setting introduced in Django 4.2 (phijma-leukeleu)

• Prevent password change form from raising a validation error when browser autocomplete fills in the “Old password” field (Chiemezuo Akujobi)

• Ensure that the legacy dropdown options, when closed, do not get accidentally clicked by other interactions on wide viewports (CheesyPhoenix, Christer Jensen)

• Add a fallback background for the editing preview iframe for sites without a background (Ian Price)

• Preserve whitespace in rendered comments (Elhussein Almasri)

• Remove search logging from project template so that new projects without the search promotions module will not error (Matt Westcott)

• Ensure text only email notifications for updated comments do not escape HTML characters (Rohit Sharma)

• Use the latest draft when copying an unpublished page for translation (Andrey Nehaychik)

• Make Workflow and Aging Pages reports only available to users with page-related permissions (Rohit Sharma)

• Make searching on specific fields work correctly on Elasticsearch when boost is in use (Matt Westcott)

• Use a visible border and background color to highlight active formatting in the rich text toolbar (Cassidy Pittman)

• Ensure image focal point box can be removed (Gunnar Scherf)

• Ensure that Snippets search results correctly use the index_results.html or index_results_template_name override on initial load (Stefan Hammer)

• Avoid error when attempting to moderate a page drafted by a now deleted user (Dan Braghis)

• Do not show multiple error messages when editing a Site to use existing hostname and port (Rohit Sharma)

• Avoid error when exporting Aging Pages report where a page has an empty last_published_by_user (Chiemezuo Akujobi)

• Ensure Page querysets support using alias and specific (Tomasz Knapik)

• Ensure workflow dashboard panels work when the page/snippet is missing (Sage Abdullah)

• Ensure ActionController explicitly checks for elements that allow select functionality (Nandini Arora)

• Prevent a ValueError with FormSubmissionsPanel on Django 5.0 when creating a new form page (Matt Westcott)

• Avoid duplicate entries in “Recent edits” panel when copying pages (Matt Westcott)

• Prevent TitleFieldPanel from raising an error when the slug field is missing or read-only (Rohit Sharma)

• Ensure that the close button on the new dialog designs is visible in the non-message variant (Nandini Arora)

• Avoid text overflow issues in comment replies and scroll position issues for long comments (Rohit Sharma)

• Remove ‘Page’ from page types filter on aging pages report (Matt Westcott)

• Prevent page types filter from showing other non-Page models that match by name (Matt Westcott)

• Ensure MultipleChooserPanel modal works correctly when USE_THOUSAND_SEPARATOR is True for pages with ids over 1,000 (Sankalp, Rohit Sharma)

• Ensure the panel anchor button sizes meet accessibility guidelines for minimum dimensions (Nandini Arora)

• Raise a 404 for bulk actions for models which don’t exist instead of throwing a 500 error (Alex Tomkins)

• Raise a SiteSetting.DoesNotExist error when retrieving settings for an unrecognized site (Nick Smith)

• Ensure that defaulted or unique values declared in exclude_fields_in_copy are correctly excluded in new copies, resolving to the default value (Elhussein Almasri)

• Ensure that default_ordering set on IndexView is preserved if ModelViewSet does not specify an explicit ordering (Cynthia Kiser)

• Resolve issue where clicking Publish for a Page that was in workflow in Safari would block publishing and not trigger the workflow confirmation modal (Alex Morega)

• Fix pagination links on model history and usage views (Matt Westcott)

• Fix crash when accessing workflow reports with a deleted snippet (Sage Abdullah)

Documentation¶

• Document, for contributors, the use of translate string literals passed as arguments to tags and filters using _() within templates (Chiemezuo Akujobi)

• Document all features for the Documents app in one location, see Documents (Neeraj Yetheendran)

• Add section to testing docs about creating pages and working with page content (Mariana Bedran Lesche)

• Add more nuance to the database recommendations in Performance (Jadesola Kareem)

• Add clarity that MultipleChooserPanel may require a chooser viewset and how the functionality is expected to work (Andy Chosak)

• Clarify where documentation build commands should be run (Nikhil S Kalburgi)

• Add missing import to tutorial BlogPage example (Salvo Polizzi)

• Update contributing guide documentation and GitHub templates to better support new contributors (Thibaud Colas)

• Add more CSS authoring guidelines (Thibaud Colas)

• Update MyST documentation parser library to 2.0.0 (Neeraj Yetheendran)

• Add documentation writing guidelines for intersphinx / external links (LB (Ben) Johnston)

• Add Page model reference get_children documentation (Salvo Polizzi)

• Enforce CI build checks for documentation so that malformed links or missing images will not be allowed (Neeraj Yetheendran)

• Update spelling on customizing admin template and page model section from British to American English (Victoria Poromon)

• Add documentation for how to override the file locations for custom image models Overriding the upload location (Osaf AliSayed, Dharmik Gangani)

• Update documentation theme (Sphinx Wagtail Theme) to 6.2.0, fixing the incorrect favicon (LB (Ben) Johnston, Sahil Jangra)

• Refactor promotion banner without jQuery and use sameSite cookies when storing if cleared (LB (Ben) Johnston)

• Use cross-reference for compatible Python versions in tutorial instead of the out of date listing (mirusu400)

Maintenance¶

Removal of ModelAdmin app¶

The wagtail.contrib.modeladmin app has been removed. If you wish to continue using it, it is available as the external package wagtail-modeladmin.

Query model moved to wagtail.contrib.search_promotions¶

The Query model (used to log search queries performed by users, to identify commonly searched terms) is no longer part of the wagtail.search module; it can now be found in the optional wagtail.contrib.search_promotions app. When updating code to import the model from the new location, ensure that you have added wagtail.contrib.search_promotions to your INSTALLED_APPS setting - failing to do this may result in a spurious migration being created within the core wagtail app.

Support for Elasticsearch 5 and 6 dropped¶

The Elasticsearch 5 and 6 backends have been removed. If you are using one of these backends, you will need to upgrade to Elasticsearch 7 or 8 before upgrading to Wagtail 6.0.

StreamField no longer requires use_json_field=True¶

The use_json_field argument to StreamField is no longer required, and can be removed. StreamField now consistently uses JSONField for its database representation, and Wagtail 5.0 required older TextField-based streams to be migrated. As such, use_json_field no longer has any effect.

Other removals¶

• The WAGTAILADMIN_GLOBAL_PAGE_EDIT_LOCK setting is no longer recognized and should be replaced with WAGTAILADMIN_GLOBAL_EDIT_LOCK.

• The wagtail.models.UserPagePermissionsProxy class and get_pages_with_direct_explore_permission, get_explorable_root_page and users_with_page_permission functions have been removed; equivalent functionality exists in the wagtail.permission_policies.pages.PagePermissionPolicy class.

• The permission_type field of the GroupPagePermission model has been removed; the permission field (a foreign key to Django’s Permission model) should be used instead.

• The legacy moderation system used before the introduction of workflows in Wagtail 2.10 has been removed. Any moderation requests still in the queue from before this time will be lost.

• The Wagtail icon font has been removed; any direct usage of this needs to be converted to SVG icons.

• Various unused icons deprecated in Wagtail 5.0 have been removed.

• The partial_match argument on SearchField and on search methods has been removed. AutocompleteField and the autocomplete method should be used instead.

• The insert_editor_css hook has been removed; the insert_global_admin_css hook should be used instead.

• The wagtail.contrib.frontend_cache module now supports azure-mgmt-cdn version 10 and azure-mgmt-frontdoor version 1 as its minimum supported versions.

• The Task.page_locked_for_user method has been removed; Task.locked_for_user should be used instead.

• The {% icon %} template tag no longer accepts class_name as an argument; classname should be used instead.

• The wagtail.tests.utils module has been removed and can now be found at wagtail.test.utils.

• The template wagtailadmin/shared/field_as_li.html has been removed, and should be replaced with wagtailadmin/shared/field.html enclosed in an <li> tag.

• The custom client-side events wagtail:show and wagtail:hide on showing and hiding dialogs have been removed; w-dialog:show and w-dialog:hide should be used instead.

• The global Javascript definitions headerSearch, initTagField, cancelSpinner and unicodeSlugsEnabled have been removed; these should be replaced with Stimulus controllers.

SnippetViewSet & ModelViewSet copy view enabled by default¶

The newly introduced copy view will be enabled by default for all ModelViewSet and SnippetViewSet classes.

This can be disabled by setting copy_view_enabled = False, for example.

class PersonViewSet(SnippetViewSet):
    model = Person
    #...
    copy_view_enabled = False

class PersonViewSet(ModelViewSet):
    model = Person
    #...
    copy_view_enabled = False

See Copy view for additional details about this feature.

Removed support for Django < 4.2¶

Django versions before 4.2 are no longer supported as of this release; please upgrade to Django 4.2 or above before upgrading Wagtail.

SlugInput widget is now the default for SlugField fields¶

In Wagtail 5.0 a new SlugInput admin widget was added to support slug behavior in Page and Page copy forms. This widget was included by default if the promote_panels fields layout was customized, causing confusion.

As of this release, any forms that inherit from WagtailAdminModelForm (includes page and snippet model editing) will now use the SlugInput by default on all models with SlugField fields.

Previously, the widget had to be explicitly added.

from wagtail.admin.widgets.slug import SlugInput
# ... other imports

class MyPage(Page):
    promote_panels = [
        FieldPanel("slug", widget=SlugInput),
        # ... other panels
    ]

Keeping the widget as above is fine, but will no longer be required. The JavaScript field behavior will be included by default.

# ... imports

class MyPage(Page):
    promote_panels = [
        FieldPanel("slug"),
        # ... other panels
    ]

If you do not want this for some reason, you will now need to declare a different widget.

from django.forms.widgets import TextInput
# ... other imports

class MyPage(Page):
    promote_panels = [
        FieldPanel("slug", widget=TextInput), # use a plain text field
        # ... other panels
    ]

Changed handling of database updates of non-live Page objects or subclasses of DraftStateMixin¶

Before this release, the database record of a Page or any subclass of DraftStateMixin either contained the live data (if published), the state of the last published version (if unpublished), or the state of the first revision (if never published). Subsequent draft edits would create new Revision records, but the main database record would not be updated. As a result, the database record could lag substantially behind the current state of the object, causing unexpected behavior particularly when unique constraints are in use.

As of this release, the database record of a non-live object will be updated to reflect the draft state of the object. This is unlikely to have a visible effect on existing sites, since the admin backend works with the Revision records while the site front-end typically filters out non-live objects. However, any code that relies on the database record being untouched by draft edits (for example, using it to store a specific approved / archived state of the page) may need to be updated.

filter_queryset and get_filtered_queryset methods no longer return filters¶

The undocumented internal methods filter_queryset(queryset) on wagtail.admin.views.generic.IndexView, and get_filtered_queryset() on wagtail.admin.views.reports.ReportView, now return just the filtered queryset; previously they returned a tuple of (filters, queryset). The filterset instance is always available as the cached property self.filters.

Deprecation of the undocumented window.enableDirtyFormCheck function¶

The admin frontend window.enableDirtyFormCheck will be removed in a future release and as of this release only supports the basic initialization.

The previous approach was to call a window global function as follows.

window.enableDirtyFormCheck('.my-form', { alwaysDirty: true, confirmationMessage: 'You have unsaved changes'});

The new approach will be data attribute driven as follows.

<form
  method="POST"
  data-controller="w-unsaved"
  data-action="w-unsaved#submit beforeunload@window->w-unsaved#confirm change->w-unsaved#check keyup->w-unsaved#check"
  data-w-unsaved-confirm-value="This page has unsaved changes." // equivalent to `confirmationMessage`.
  data-w-unsaved-force-value="true" // equivalent to `alwaysDirty`.
  data-w-unsaved-watch-value="edits comments" // can add 'comments' if comments is enabled, defaults to only 'edits'.
  >
  ... form contents
</form>

data-tippy-content attribute support will be removed¶

The implementation of the JS tooltips have been fully migrated to the Stimulus w-tooltip/TooltipController implementation.

Dynamic support for any data-tippy-content="..." usage will be removed this release, for example, within chooser modals or dynamic html response data.

Some minimal backwards compatibility support for data-tippy-content will work until a future release, but only in the initial HTML response on a page.

Deprecated WidgetWithScript base widget class¶

The undocumented WidgetWithScript class that used inline scripts to attach JavaScript to widgets will be removed in a future release.

This approach creates security risks and will not be compliant with CSP support. Instead, it’s recommended that all similar requirements migrate to use the recommended Stimulus JS integration approach.

A full example of how to build this has been documented on extending client-side behavior, a basic example is below.

from django.forms import Media, widgets


class CustomRichTextArea(WidgetWithScript, widgets.Textarea):
    def render_js_init(self, id_, name, value):
        return f"window.customEditorInitScript({json.dumps(id_)});"

    @property
    def media(self):
        return Media(js=["vendor/custom-editor.js"])

from django.forms import Media, widgets


class CustomRichTextArea(widgets.Textarea):
    def build_attrs(self, *args, **kwargs):
        attrs = super().build_attrs(*args, **kwargs)
        attrs['data-controller'] = 'custom-editor'

    @property
    def media(self):
        return Media(js=["vendor/custom-editor.js","js/custom-editor-controller.js"])

// myapp/static/js/custom-editor-controller.js

class CustomEditorController extends window.StimulusModule.Controller {
    connect() {
        window.customEditorInitScript(this.element.id);
    }
}

window.wagtail.app.register('custom-editor', CustomEditorController);