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Why We Use the Wagtail Content Management System


We have been using Wagtail since 2016 and highly recommend it as our CMS of choice. The following are reasons why we are delighted with Wagtail.

Continuous Improvement

The steady rollout of fixes and improvements over the years has been remarkable. The Wagtail feature set has come a long way from the 1.x days, and the growth in Wagtail's popularity has been continual.

Page editing

  • Wagtail includes a live preview while editing (including mobile, tablet, and desktop views). This is invaluable to content editors for seeing what the final result will look like when published.
  • Wagtail includes a built-in accessibility checker for content.
  • To assist with SEO, Wagtail can be customized to include editing logic such as preventing the use of an H3 style unless it is preceded by an H2 style.
  • Wagtail includes a moderation workflow with the capability for reviewers to add comments to content that is in-progress.
  • Wagtail includes a visual history of page edits.

Very granular object permissions

Because Wagtail is built on Django, the capability to manage and edit Django model instances is included as a part of Wagtail. These custom data types are in addition to Wagtail's built-in model types (pages, documents, and images). In addition, Wagtail includes the capability to create Collections in which documents and/or images may be stored. Each user can be set up to view, edit, and/or delete as many or as few of these built-in or custom data types as necessary.

The clean left-side menu

In contrast to some more widely used CMSes, the Wagtail left-side menu is tidy and easy to navigate. As described under object permissions above, what a user sees and their capability to make changes can be very narrowly scoped. This provides for a much cleaner left-side menu without needing special plugins to reduce the number of items that appear in the menu.

Capability to implement full-site content search via a single search field

A single search field is the most convenient way for users to search a site. When full-site search is employed on a Wagtail site, we set it up to return results by content type. Users find this to be the best possible search experience.

Summary listing of form submissions by form type

Wagtail includes the capability to create custom forms with no extra plugins or libraries needed. Form submissions can be set up to be sent to as many email addresses as desired, and all form submissions are captured for easy viewing in the Wagtail admin.

The Wordpress to Wagtail migration tool

Wagtail includes a WordPress to Wagtail migration tool. Contact us for details.

More on Custom Data Types

The capability to define custom data types simplifies the editing interface for users. For example, a NewsItem object could have summary, image, and content properties defined, and that is all a Wagtail user would have to be concerned with entering. Wagtail would handle the presentation of the entered data without the user having to be concerned about how the site looks while entering the data.

Multi-site Capability

Wagtail includes multi-site capability, and users can edit the sites under a single admin login. Editing capability can also be assigned to individual users on a per-site basis, so, for example, if you had a site in English and another site in a different language, English-speaking users could be set up to only be able to edit the English-language site while other users could be set up to edit the other-language site.

A large user community

Since its earliest days as a product of Torchbox, Wagtail has had a friendly and growing user community with user events held around the world.

Used by some of the largest organizations in the world

Wagtail is capable of handling the most demanding website needs. Organizations of all sizes including NASA JPL*, Google, the UK Health Service, universities, local governments, and more have moved to Wagtail. Will you be next? Contact us to start a discussion.

* The websites shown on Made With Wagtail are simply a subset of the universe of sites that run on the Wagtail CMS. This listing of sites includes only those that developers have taken the time to submit to Made With Wagtail.

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