Wagtail 2.0 release notes

What’s new

Added Django 2.0 support

Wagtail is now compatible with Django 2.0. Compatibility fixes were contributed by Matt Westcott, Karl Hobley, LB (Ben Johnston) and Mads Jensen.

New rich text editor

Wagtail’s rich text editor has now been replaced with Draftail, a new editor based on Draft.js, fixing numerous bugs and providing an improved editing experience, better support for current browsers, and more consistent HTML output. This feature was developed by Thibaud Colas, Loïc Teixeira and Matt Westcott.

Reorganised modules

The modules that make up Wagtail have been renamed and reorganised, to avoid the repetition in names like wagtail.wagtailcore.models (originally an artefact of app naming limitations in Django 1.6) and to improve consistency. While this will require some up-front work to upgrade existing Wagtail sites, we believe that this will be a long-term improvement to the developer experience, improving readability of code and reducing errors. This change was implemented by Karl Hobley and Matt Westcott.

Scheduled page revisions

The behaviour of scheduled publishing has been revised so that pages are no longer unpublished at the point of setting a future go-live date, making it possible to schedule updates to an existing published page. This feature was developed by Patrick Woods.

Other features

  • Moved Wagtail API v1 implementation (wagtail.contrib.api) to an external app (Karl Hobley)
  • The page chooser now searches all fields of a page, instead of just the title (Bertrand Bordage)
  • Implement ordering by date in form submission view (LB (Ben Johnston))
  • Elasticsearch scroll API is now used when fetching more than 100 search results (Karl Hobley)
  • Added hidden field to the form builder (Ross Crawford-d’Heureuse)
  • Usage count now shows on delete confirmation page when WAGTAIL_USAGE_COUNT_ENABLED is active (Kees Hink)
  • Added usage count to snippets (Kees Hink)
  • Moved usage count to the sidebar on the edit page (Kees Hink)
  • Explorer menu now reflects customisations to the page listing made via the construct_explorer_page_queryset hook and ModelAdmin.exclude_from_explorer property (Tim Heap)
  • “Choose another image” button changed to “Change image” to avoid ambiguity (Edd Baldry)
  • Added hooks before_create_user, after_create_user, before_delete_user, after_delete_user, before_edit_user, after_edit_user (Jon Carmack)
  • Added exclude_fields_in_copy property to Page to define fields that should not be included on page copy (LB (Ben Johnston))
  • Improved error message on incorrect {% image %} tag syntax (LB (Ben Johnston))
  • Optimized preview data storage (Bertrand Bordage)
  • Added render_landing_page method to AbstractForm to be easily overridden and pass form_submission to landing page context (Stein Strindhaug)
  • Added heading kwarg to InlinePanel to allow heading to be set independently of button label (Adrian Turjak)
  • The value type returned from a StructBlock can now be customised. See Custom value class for StructBlock (LB (Ben Johnston))
  • Added bgcolor image operation (Karl Hobley)
  • Added WAGTAILADMIN_USER_LOGIN_FORM setting for overriding the admin login form (Mike Dingjan)
  • Snippets now support custom primary keys (Sævar Öfjörð Magnússon)
  • Upgraded jQuery to version 3.2.1 (Janneke Janssen)
  • Update autoprefixer configuration to better match browser support targets (Janneke Janssen)
  • Update React and related dependencies to latest versions (Janneke Janssen, Hugo van den Berg)
  • Remove Hallo editor .richtext CSS class in favour of more explicit extension points (Thibaud Colas)
  • Updated documentation styling (LB (Ben Johnston))
  • Rich text fields now take feature lists into account when whitelisting HTML elements (Matt Westcott)
  • FormPage lists and Form submission lists in admin now use class based views for easy overriding (Johan Arensman)
  • Form submission csv exports now have the export date in the filename and can be customized (Johan Arensman)
  • FormBuilder class now uses bound methods for field generation, adding custom fields is now easier and documented (LB (Ben Johnston))
  • Added WAGTAILADMIN_NOTIFICATION_INCLUDE_SUPERUSERS setting to determine whether superusers are included in moderation email notifications (Bruno Alla)
  • Added a basic Dockerfile to the project template (Tom Dyson)
  • StreamField blocks now allow custom get_template methods for overriding templates in instances (Christopher Bledsoe)
  • Simplified edit handler API (Florent Osmont, Bertrand Bordage)
  • Made ‘add/change/delete collection’ permissions configurable from the group edit page (Matt Westcott)
  • Expose React-related dependencies as global variables for extension in the admin interface (Thibaud Colas)
  • Added helper functions for constructing form data for use with assertCanCreate. See Form data helpers (Tim Heap, Matt Westcott)

Bug fixes

  • Do not remove stopwords when generating slugs from non-ASCII titles, to avoid issues with incorrect word boundaries (Sævar Öfjörð Magnússon)
  • The PostgreSQL search backend now preserves ordering of the QuerySet when searching with order_by_relevance=False (Bertrand Bordage)
  • Using modeladmin_register as a decorator no longer replaces the decorated class with None (Tim Heap)
  • Fixed crash in XML sitemap generator when all pages on the site are private (Stein Strindhaug)
  • The {% routablepageurl %} template tag no longer generates invalid URLs when the WAGTAIL_APPEND_SLASH setting was set to False (Venelin Stoykov)
  • The “View live” button is no longer shown if the page doesn’t have a routable URL (Tim Heap)
  • API listing views no longer fail when no site records are defined (Karl Hobley)
  • Fixed rendering of border on dropdown arrow buttons on Chrome (Bertrand Bordage)
  • Fixed incorrect z-index on userbar causing it to appear behind page content (Stein Strindhaug)
  • Form submissions pagination no longer looses date filter when changing page (Bertrand Bordage)
  • PostgreSQL search backend now removes duplicate page instances from the database (Bertrand Bordage)
  • FormSubmissionsPanel now recognises custom form submission classes (LB (Ben Johnston))
  • Prevent the footer and revisions link from unnecessarily collapsing on mobile (Jack Paine)
  • Empty searches were activated when paginating through images and documents (LB (Ben Johnston))
  • Summary numbers of pages, images and documents were not responsive when greater than 4 digits (Michael Palmer)
  • Project template now has password validators enabled by default (Matt Westcott)
  • Alignment options correctly removed from TableBlock context menu (LB (Ben Johnston))
  • Fix support of ATOMIC_REBUILD for projects with Elasticsearch client >=1.7.0 (Mikalai Radchuk)
  • Fixed error on Elasticsearch backend when passing a QuerySet as an __in filter (Karl Hobley, Matt Westcott)
  • __isnull filters no longer fail on Elasticsearch 5 (Karl Hobley)
  • Prevented intermittent failures on Postgres search backend when a field is defined as both a SearchField and a FilterField (Matt Westcott)
  • Alt text of images in rich text is no longer truncated on double-quote characters (Matt Westcott)
  • Ampersands in embed URLs within rich text are no longer double-escaped (Matt Westcott)
  • Using RGBA images no longer crashes with Pillow >= 4.2.0 (Karl Hobley)
  • Copying a page with PostgreSQL search enabled no longer crashes (Bertrand Bordage)
  • Style of the page unlock button was broken (Bertrand Bordage)
  • Admin search no longer floods browser history (Bertrand Bordage)
  • Version comparison now handles custom primary keys on inline models correctly (LB (Ben Johnston))
  • Fixed error when inserting chooser panels into FieldRowPanel (Florent Osmont, Bertrand Bordage)
  • Reinstated missing error reporting on image upload (Matt Westcott)
  • Only load Hallo CSS if Hallo is in use (Thibaud Colas)
  • Prevent style leak of Wagtail panel icons in widgets using h2 elements (Thibaud Colas)

Upgrade considerations

Removed support for Python 2.7, Django 1.8 and Django 1.10

Python 2.7, Django 1.8 and Django 1.10 are no longer supported in this release. You are advised to upgrade your project to Python 3 and Django 1.11 before upgrading to Wagtail 2.0.

Added support for Django 2.0

Before upgrading to Django 2.0, you are advised to review the release notes, especially the backwards incompatible changes and removed features.

Wagtail module path updates

Many of the module paths within Wagtail have been reorganised to reduce duplication - for example, wagtail.wagtailcore.models is now wagtail.core.models. As a result, import lines and other references to Wagtail modules will need to be updated when you upgrade to Wagtail 2.0. A new command has been added to assist with this - from the root of your project’s code base:

$ wagtail updatemodulepaths --list  # list the files to be changed without updating them
$ wagtail updatemodulepaths --diff  # show the changes to be made, without updating files
$ wagtail updatemodulepaths  # actually update the files

Or, to run from a different location:

$ wagtail updatemodulepaths /path/to/project --list
$ wagtail updatemodulepaths /path/to/project --diff
$ wagtail updatemodulepaths /path/to/project

For the full list of command line options, enter wagtail help updatemodulepaths.

You are advised to take a backup of your project codebase before running this command. The command will perform a search-and-replace over all *.py files for the affected module paths; while this should catch the vast majority of module references, it will not be able to fix instances that do not use the dotted path directly, such as from wagtail import wagtailcore.

The full list of modules to be renamed is as follows:

Old name New name Notes
wagtail.wagtailcore wagtail.core  
wagtail.wagtailadmin wagtail.admin  
wagtail.wagtaildocs wagtail.documents ‘documents’ no longer abbreviated
wagtail.wagtailembeds wagtail.embeds  
wagtail.wagtailimages wagtail.images  
wagtail.wagtailsearch wagtail.search  
wagtail.wagtailsites wagtail.sites  
wagtail.wagtailsnippets wagtail.snippets  
wagtail.wagtailusers wagtail.users  
wagtail.wagtailforms wagtail.contrib.forms Moved into ‘contrib’
wagtail.wagtailredirects wagtail.contrib.redirects Moved into ‘contrib’
wagtail.contrib.wagtailapi removed API v1, removed in this release
wagtail.contrib.wagtailfrontendcache wagtail.contrib.frontend_cache Underscore added
wagtail.contrib.wagtailroutablepage wagtail.contrib.routable_page Underscore added
wagtail.contrib.wagtailsearchpromotions wagtail.contrib.search_promotions Underscore added
wagtail.contrib.wagtailsitemaps wagtail.contrib.sitemaps  
wagtail.contrib.wagtailstyleguide wagtail.contrib.styleguide  

Places these should be updated include:

  • import lines
  • Paths specified in settings, such as INSTALLED_APPS, MIDDLEWARE and WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS
  • Fields and blocks referenced within migrations, such as wagtail.wagtailcore.fields.StreamField and wagtail.wagtailcore.blocks.RichTextBlock

However, note that this only applies to dotted module paths beginning with wagtail.. App names that are not part of a dotted module path should be left unchanged - in this case, the wagtail prefix is still required to avoid clashing with other apps that might exist in the project with names such as admin or images. The following should be left unchanged:

  • Foreign keys specifying a model as 'app_name.ModelName', e.g. models.ForeignKey('wagtailimages.Image',...)
  • App labels used in database table names, content types or permissions
  • Paths to templates and static files, e.g. when overriding admin templates with custom branding
  • Template tag library names, e.g. {% load wagtailcore_tags %}

Hallo.js customisations are unavailable on the Draftail rich text editor

The Draftail rich text editor has a substantially different API from Hallo.js, including the use of a non-HTML format for its internal data representation; as a result, functionality added through Hallo.js plugins will be unavailable. If your project is dependent on Hallo.js-specific behaviour, you can revert to the original Hallo-based editor by adding the following to your settings:

WAGTAILADMIN_RICH_TEXT_EDITORS = {
    'default': {
        'WIDGET': 'wagtail.admin.rich_text.HalloRichTextArea'
    }
}

Data format for rich text fields in assertCanCreate tests has been updated

The assertCanCreate test method (see Testing your Wagtail site) requires data to be passed in the same format that the page edit form would submit. The Draftail rich text editor posts this data in a non-HTML format, and so any existing assertCanCreate tests involving rich text fields will fail when Draftail is in use:

self.assertCanCreate(root_page, ContentPage, {
    'title': 'About us',
    'body': '<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</p>',  # will not work
})

Wagtail now provides a set of helper functions for constructing form data: see Form data helpers. The above assertion can now be rewritten as:

from wagtail.tests.utils.form_data import rich_text

self.assertCanCreate(root_page, ContentPage, {
    'title': 'About us',
    'body': rich_text('<p>Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet</p>'),
})

Removed support for Elasticsearch 1.x

Elasticsearch 1.x is no longer supported in this release. Please upgrade to a 2.x or 5.x release of Elasticsearch before upgrading to Wagtail 2.0.

Removed version 1 of the Wagtail API

Version 1 of the Wagtail API (wagtail.contrib.wagtailapi) has been removed from Wagtail.

If you’re using version 1, you will need to migrate to version 2. Please see Wagtail API v2 Configuration Guide and Wagtail API v2 Usage Guide.

If migrating to version 2 is not an option right now (if you have API clients that you don’t have direct control over, such as a mobile app), you can find the implementation of the version 1 API in the new wagtailapi_legacy repository.

This repository has been created to provide a place for the community to collaborate on supporting legacy versions of the API until everyone has migrated to an officially supported version.

construct_whitelister_element_rules hook is deprecated

The construct_whitelister_element_rules hook, used to specify additional HTML elements to be permitted in rich text, is deprecated. The recommended way of whitelisting elements is now to use rich text features - see Whitelisting rich text elements. For example, a whitelist rule that was previously defined as:

from wagtail.core import hooks
from wagtail.core.whitelist import allow_without_attributes

@hooks.register('construct_whitelister_element_rules')
def whitelist_blockquote():
    return {
        'blockquote': allow_without_attributes,
    }

can be rewritten as:

from wagtail.admin.rich_text.converters.editor_html import WhitelistRule
from wagtail.core import hooks
from wagtail.core.whitelist import allow_without_attributes

@hooks.register('register_rich_text_features')
def blockquote_feature(features):

    # register a feature 'blockquote' which whitelists the <blockquote> element
    features.register_converter_rule('editorhtml', 'blockquote', [
        WhitelistRule('blockquote', allow_without_attributes),
    ])

    # add 'blockquote' to the default feature set
    features.default_features.append('blockquote')

Please note that the new Draftail rich text editor uses a different mechanism to process rich text content, and does not apply whitelist rules; they only take effect when the Hallo.js editor is in use.

wagtail.images.views.serve.generate_signature now returns a string

The generate_signature function in wagtail.images.views.serve, used to build URLs for the dynamic image serve view, now returns a string rather than a byte string. This ensures that any existing user code that builds up the final image URL with reverse will continue to work on Django 2.0 (which no longer allows byte strings to be passed to reverse). Any code that expects a byte string as the return value of generate_string - for example, calling decode() on the result - will need to be updated. (Apps that need to preserve compatibility with earlier versions of Wagtail can call django.utils.encoding.force_text instead of decode.)

Deprecated search view

Wagtail has always included a bundled view for frontend search. However, this view isn’t easy to customise so defining this view per project is usually preferred. If you have used this bundled view (check for an import from wagtail.wagtailsearch.urls in your project’s urls.py), you will need to replace this with your own implementation.

See the search view in Wagtail demo for a guide: https://github.com/wagtail/wagtaildemo/blob/master/demo/views.py

New Hallo editor extension points

With the introduction of a new editor, we want to make sure existing editor plugins meant for Hallo only target Hallo editors for extension.

  • The existing .richtext CSS class is no longer applied to the Hallo editor’s DOM element.
  • In JavaScript, use the [data-hallo-editor] attribute selector to target the editor, eg. var $editor = $('[data-hallo-editor]');.
  • In CSS, use the .halloeditor class selector.

For example,

/* JS */
- var widget = $(elem).parent('.richtext').data('IKS-hallo');
+ var widget = $(elem).parent('[data-hallo-editor]').data('IKS-hallo');

[...]

/* Styles */
- .richtext {
+ .halloeditor {
    font-family: monospace;
}