Wagtail 2.11 release notes - IN DEVELOPMENT

Wagtail 2.11 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 12 months).

What’s new

Page aliases

This release introduces support for creating page aliases.

Page aliases are exact copies of another page that sit in another part of the tree. They remain in sync with the original page until this link is removed by converting them into a regular page, or deleting the original page.

A page alias can be created through the “Copy Page” UI by selecting the “Alias” checkbox when creating a page copy.

Collections hierarchy

Collections (for organising images, documents or other media) can now be managed as a hierarchy rather than a flat list. This feature was developed by Robert Rollins.

Other features

  • Add before_edit_snippet, before_create_snippet and before_delete_snippet hooks and documentation (Karl Hobley. Sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation)

  • Add register_snippet_listing_buttons and construct_snippet_listing_buttons hooks and documentation (Karl Hobley. Sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation)

  • Add wagtail --version to available Wagtail CLI commands (Kalob Taulien)

  • Add hooks.register_temporarily utility function for testing hooks (Karl Hobley. Sponsored by the Mozilla Foundation)

  • Remove unidecode and use anyascii in for Unicode to ASCII conversion (Robbie Mackay)

  • Add render helper to RoutablePageMixin to support serving template responses according to Wagtail conventions (Andy Babic)

  • Specify minimum Python version in setup.py (Vince Salvino)

  • Extend treebeard’s fix_tree method with the ability to non-destructively fix path issues and add a –full option to apply path fixes (Matt Westcott)

  • Add support for hierarchical/nested Collections (Robert Rollins)

  • Show user’s full name in report views (Matt Westcott)

  • Improve Wagtail admin page load performance by caching SVG icons sprite in localStorage (Coen van der Kamp)

  • Support SVG icons in ModelAdmin menu items (Scott Cranfill)

  • Support SVG icons in admin breadcrumbs (Coen van der Kamp)

  • Serve PDFs inline in the browser (Matt Westcott)

  • Make document content-type and content-disposition configurable via WAGTAILDOCS_CONTENT_TYPES and WAGTAILDOCS_INLINE_CONTENT_TYPES (Matt Westcott)

  • Slug generation no longer removes stopwords (Andy Chosak, Scott Cranfill)

  • Add check to disallow StreamField block names that do not match Python variable syntax (François Poulain)

  • The BASE_URL setting is now converted to a string, if it isn’t already, when constructing API URLs (thenewguy)

  • Preview from ‘pages awaiting moderation’ now opens in a new window (Cynthia Kiser)

  • Add document extension validation if WAGTAIL_DOCS_EXTENSIONS is set to a list of allowed extensions (Meghana Bhange)

  • Use django-admin command in place of django-admin.py (minusf)

  • Add register_snippet_action_menu_item and construct_snippet_action_menu hooks to modify the actions available when creating / editing a snippet (Karl Hobley)

  • Moved generate_signature and verify_signature functions into wagtail.images.utils (Noah H)

  • Implement bulk_to_python on all structural StreamField block types (Matt Westcott)

  • Add natural key support to GroupCollectionPermission (Jim Jazwiecki)

  • Implement prepopulated_fields for wagtail.contrib.modeladmin (David Bramwell)

  • Change classname keyword argument on basic StreamField blocks to form_classname (Meghana Bhange)

Bug fixes

  • Make page-level actions accessible to keyboard users in page listing tables (Jesse Menn)

  • WAGTAILFRONTENDCACHE_LANGUAGES was being interpreted incorrectly. It now accepts a list of strings, as documented (Karl Hobley)

  • Update oEmbed endpoints to use https where available (Matt Westcott)

  • Revise edit_handler bind order in ModelAdmin views and fix duplicate form instance creation (Jérôme Lebleu)

  • Properly distinguish child blocks when comparing revisions with nested StreamBlocks (Martin Mena)

  • Correctly handle Turkish ‘İ’ characters in client-side slug generation (Matt Westcott)

  • Page chooser widgets now reflect custom get_admin_display_title methods (Saptak Sengupta)

  • Page.copy() now raises an error if the page being copied is unsaved (Anton Zhyltsou)

  • Page.copy() now triggers a page_published if the copied page is live (Anton Zhyltsou)

  • The Elasticsearch URLS setting can now take a string on its own instead of a list (Sævar Öfjörð Magnússon)

  • Avoid retranslating month / weekday names that Django already provides (Matt Westcott)

  • Fixed padding around checkbox and radio inputs (Cole Maclean)

  • Fix spacing around the privacy indicator panel (Sævar Öfjörð Magnússon, Dan Braghis)

  • Consistently redirect to admin home on permission denied (Matt Westcott, Samgans)

Upgrade considerations

IE11 support being phased out

This release begins the process of phasing out support for Internet Explorer. Please see IE11 for details of the timeline over which support will be dropped.

SiteMiddleware moved to wagtail.contrib.legacy

The SiteMiddleware class (which provides the request.site property, and has been deprecated since Wagtail 2.9) has been moved to the wagtail.contrib.legacy namespace. On projects where this is still in use, the 'wagtail.core.middleware.SiteMiddleware' entry in MIDDLEWARE should be changed to 'wagtail.contrib.legacy.sitemiddleware.SiteMiddleware'.

Collection model enforces alphabetical ordering

As part of the hierarchical collections support, the path field on the Collection model now enforces alphabetical ordering. Previously, collections were stored in the order in which they were created - and then sorted by name where displayed in the CMS. This change will be handled automatically through migrations when upgrading to Wagtail 2.11.

However, if your project creates new collections programmatically after migrations have run, and assigns the path field directly - for example, by loading from a fixture file - this code will need to be updated to insert them in alphabetical order. Otherwise, errors may occur when subsequently adding new collections through the Wagtail admin. This can be done as follows:

  • Update paths to match alphabetical order. For example, if you have a fixture that creates the collections Zebras and Aardvarks with paths 00010001 and 00010002 respectively, these paths should be swapped.

  • Alternatively, after creating the collections, run the Python code:

    from wagtail.core.models import Collection
Collection.fix_tree(fix_paths=True)

    or the management command:

    python manage.py fixtree --full

Site.get_site_root_paths now returns language code

In previous releases, Site.get_site_root_paths returned a list of (site_id, root_path, root_url) tuples. To support the new internationalisation model, this has now been changed to a list of named tuples with the fields: site_id, root_path, root_url and language_code. Existing code that handled this as a 3-tuple should be updated accordingly.

classname argument on StreamField blocks is now form_classname

Basic StreamField block types such as CharBlock previously accepted a classname keyword argument, to specify a class attribute to appear on the page editing form. For consistency with StructBlock, this has now been changed to form_classname. The classname argument is still recognised, but deprecated.