Wagtail

During the last year we gave our popular technical blog an official name: Developer Access. We published 32 posts on the blog, including technical how-to’s, conference information, web development best practices and detailed guides. Among all those posts, 19 rose to the top of the popularity list (based on total pageviews):

Wagtail is a fantastic content management system that does a great job of making it easy for developers to get a new website up and running quickly and painlessly. It’s no wonder that Wagtail has grown to become the leading Django-based CMS. As one of the creators of Wagtail recently said, it makes the initial experience of getting a website set up and running very good. At Caktus, Wagtail is our go-to framework when we need a content management system.

It’s no secret that Caktus ❤️’s Wagtail, our favorite Django-based CMS. On July 25, I had the pleasure of attending Wagtail Space US, an annual convening and celebration of all things Wagtail at The Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. After a couple days of talks, workshops, and sprints, we’re even more excited by what Wagtail can offer us and our clients.

New clients regularly ask us if we build WordPress sites. When we dig deeper, we generally learn that they’re looking for a user-friendly content management system (CMS) that will allow them to effortlessly publish and curate their site content. As we’ve written about previously, WordPress can be a good fit for simple sites. However, the majority of our clients need a more robust technical solution with customizable content management tools. For the Python-driven web applications that we develop, we love to work with Wagtail.

If you’re building or updating a website, you’re probably wondering about which content management system (CMS) to use. A CMS helps users — particularly non-technical users — to add pages and blog posts, embed videos and images, and incorporate other content into their site.

In the early stages of a web development project, your first step is a big decision: what’s the right tool for the job? What kind of software makes the most sense for me?

There are plenty of reasons to upgrade your Wagtail site. Before we look at how to do it, let’s take a look at a few of those reasons.

Caktus CEO Tobias McNulty and Sales Engineer David Ray recently had the opportunity to attend a development sprint for the Wagtail Content Management System (CMS) in Reykjavik, Iceland. The two-day software development sprint attracted 15 attendees hailing from a total of 5 countries across North America and Europe.

Last Friday, Caktus set aside client projects for our regular quarterly ShipIt Day. From gerrymandered districts to RPython and meetup planning, the team started off 2017 with another great ShipIt.

My first Caktus project went live late in the summer of 2015. It's a community portal for users of an SMS-based product called RapidPro. The portal was built in the Wagtail CMS framework which has a lovely, intuitive admin interface and excellent documentation for developers and content editors. The code for our Wagtail-based project is all open sourced on GitHub.