Wagtail 1.1 release notes

September 15, 2015

What’s new

specific() method on PageQuerySet

Usually, an operation that retrieves a QuerySet of pages (such as homepage.get_children()) will return them as basic Page instances, which only include the core page data such as title. The specific() method (e.g. homepage.get_children().specific()) now allows them to be retrieved as their most specific type, using the minimum number of queries.

Atomic rebuilding of Elasticsearch indexes

The Elasticsearch search backend now accepts an experimental ATOMIC_REBUILD flag which ensures that the existing search index continues to be available while the update_index task is running. See ATOMIC_REBUILD.

The wagtailapi module now uses Django REST Framework

The wagtailapi module is now built on Django REST Framework and it now also has a library of serialisers that you can use in your own REST Framework based APIs. No user-facing changes have been made.

We hope to support more REST framework features, such as a browsable API, in future releases.

Permissions fixes in the admin interface

A number of inconsistencies around permissions in the admin interface were fixed in this release:

  • Removed all permissions for “User profile” (not used)

  • Removed “delete” permission for Images and documents (not used)

  • Users can now access images and documents when they only have the “change” permission (previously required “add” permission as well)

  • Permissions for Users now taken from custom user model, if set (previously always used permissions on Django’s builtin User model)

  • Groups and Users now respond consistently to their respective “add”, “change” and “delete” permissions

Searchable snippets

Snippets that inherit from wagtail.wagtailsearch.index.Indexed are now given a search box on the snippet chooser and listing pages. See Making snippets searchable.

Minor features

  • Implemented deletion of form submissions

  • Implemented pagination in the page chooser modal

  • Changed INSTALLED_APPS in project template to list apps in precedence order

  • The {% image %} tag now supports filters on the image variable, e.g. {% image primary_img|default:secondary_img width-500 %}

  • Moved the style guide menu item into the Settings sub-menu

  • Search backends can now be specified by module (e.g. wagtail.wagtailsearch.backends.elasticsearch), rather than a specific class (wagtail.wagtailsearch.backends.elasticsearch.ElasticSearch)

  • Added descendant_of filter to the API

  • Added optional directory argument to “wagtail start” command

  • Non-superusers can now view/edit/delete sites if they have the correct permissions

  • Image file size is now stored in the database, to avoid unnecessary filesystem lookups

  • Page URL lookups hit the cache/database less often

  • Updated URLs within the admin backend to use namespaces

  • The update_index task now indexes objects in batches of 1000, to indicate progress and avoid excessive memory use

  • Added database indexes on PageRevision and Image to improve performance on large sites

  • Search in page chooser now uses Wagtail’s search framework, to order results by relevance

  • PageChooserPanel now supports passing a list (or tuple) of accepted page types

  • The snippet type parameter of SnippetChooserPanel can now be omitted, or passed as a model name string rather than a model class

  • Added aliases for the self template variable to accommodate Jinja as a templating engine: page for pages, field_panel for field panels / edit handlers, and value for blocks

  • Added signposting text to the explorer to steer editors away from creating pages at the root level unless they are setting up new sites

  • “Clear choice” and “Edit this page” buttons are no longer shown on the page field of the group page permissions form

  • Altered styling of stream controls to be more like all other buttons

  • Added ability to mark page models as not available for creation using the flag is_creatable; pages that are abstract Django models are automatically made non-creatable

  • New translations for Norwegian Bokmål and Icelandic

Bug fixes

  • Text areas in the non-default tab of the page editor now resize to the correct height

  • Tabs in “insert link” modal in the rich text editor no longer disappear (Tim Heap)

  • H2 elements in rich text fields were accidentally given a click() binding when put insite a collapsible multi field panel

  • The wagtailimages module is now compatible with remote storage backends that do not allow reopening closed files

  • Search no longer crashes when auto-indexing a model that doesn’t have an id field

  • The wagtailfrontendcache module’s HTTP backend has been rewritten to reliably direct requests to the configured cache hostname

  • Resizing single pixel images with the “fill” filter no longer raises ZeroDivisionError or “tile cannot extend outside image”

  • The QuerySet returned from search operations when using the database search backend now correctly preserves additional properties of the original query, such as prefetch_related / select_related

  • Responses from the external image URL generator are correctly marked as streaming and will no longer fail when used with Django’s cache middleware

  • Page copy now works with pages that use multiple inheritance

  • Form builder pages now pick up template variables defined in the get_context method

  • When copying a page, IDs of child objects within page revision records were not remapped to the new objects; this would cause those objects to be lost from the original page when editing the new one

  • Newly added redirects now take effect on all sites, rather than just the site that the Wagtail admin backend was accessed through

  • Add user form no longer throws a hard error on validation failure

Upgrade considerations

is_abstract flag on page models has been replaced by is_creatable

Previous versions of Wagtail provided an undocumented is_abstract flag on page models - not to be confused with Django’s abstract Meta flag - to indicate that it should not be included in the list of available page types for creation. (Typically this would be used on model classes that were designed to be subclassed to create new page types, rather than used directly.) To avoid confusion with Django’s distinct concept of abstract models, this has now been replaced by a new flag, is_creatable.

If you have used is_abstract = True on any of your models, you should now change this to is_creatable = False.

It is not necessary to include this flag if the model is abstract in the Django sense (i.e. it has abstract = True in the model’s Meta class), since it would never be valid to create pages of that type.