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About Wagtail
Wagtail is a popular content management system. It's built on Python, by an active and engaged open source community, which has grown rapidly since Wagtail's release in 2014. Wagtail is available in over 40 languages, and used by some of the world's best-known organizations, including NASA, Google, Mozilla, MIT, and the UK's National Health Service, as well as museums, universities, non-profits, governments, banks, studios, restaurants, startups and bloggers around the world.
Like Python and Django, the technologies which underpin it, Wagtail is known for its welcoming community. We're keen to increase the geographic and cultural diversity of our core team, who are currently spread across Europe, Africa and North America. We seek to offer friendly support on Slack, StackOverflow and Github, and we encourage the community to meet in real life where possible, with recent sprints and conferences held in South Africa, Iceland, the USA, Belarus and the UK.
Wagtail has moved fast in the last few years, with particular focus on the editor experience, the refinement of APIs for headless CMS architectures and accessibility. We have adopted a regular quarterly release cycle, which aims to minimise upgrade time while providing compelling new features and improvements with each point releases. We're seeking help to deliver some of our more ambitious plans, many of which are expressed as [RFCs]. We're also open to your ideas for making Wagtail the best open source CMS for the 2020s!
Students
Applicants should have a basic familiarity with Python, Django and Git. They should have completed the initial Wagtail Tutorial and have created a developer environment for working on Wagtail itself. They should join the Wagtail Slack and introduce themselves on the #gsoc channel. They are welcome to seek advice from mentors on suitable projects and topics, which should then be submitted to the project issue list with our Google Summer of Code issue template.
Write a motivation and submit your CV. Tell us about your experience with Python/Django/Wagtail
Project ideas
Wagtail Live
Summary
High speed content delivery. A live blog from chat applications to a Wagtail site.
Content editors will enter their content into Slack (or any other messaging application) and this will live update the Wagtail live-blog page.
- Live example: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/live/2020/feb/05/pmqs-boris-johnson-corbyn-bbc-could-end-up-as-defunct-as-blockbuster-unless-it-adapts-to-digital-era-says-culture-secretary-nicky-morgan-live-news
- POC (Proof Of Concept): https://github.com/allcaps/wagtail-live
- Video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JL-MlNl2Buc&feature=youtu.be
Implementation
- Input a chat application / third party product
- Output on a live blog page
- Message server (Django Channels)
Skills
- Python, Django, Wagtail
- Message server
- Consume Chat API’s
Mentors Tom Dyson and Coen van der Kamp
Aims To produce a Wagtail package to deliver content fast
Bulk admin actions
Summary
Enable bulk actions in a variety of Wagtail administrative interfaces
Implementation
- Allow performing common tasks (such as delete, publish etc) in bulk for Wagtail Pages, Images and Documents
- Provide an extension mechanism that will enable developers to provide custom actions
Skills
- Django, Python and front-end
Mentors Karl Hobley
Aims
To enhance the Wagtail administrative interface
New database search backend
Summary
A new search backend that makes use of the search features of the current database. With support for SQLite and PostgreSQL search features.
This will replace the existing database and PostgreSQL search backends in Wagtail.
Implementation
- Create a search backend that creates a separate database table for each search index (pages, images, and documents). These tables should make use of whatever search specific types and indexes are available in the currently used database engine
- Implement the search query interface to allow retrieving data from these search backends
- (optional) Create a test suite that tests the quality of the results that each search backend returns
Skills
- Databases
- Search / PostgreSQL FTS / SQLite FTS / MySQL FTS
Mentors
Karl Hobley
Aims
- Improve the quality of results for the existing PostgreSQL search backend
- Add support for SQLite and MySQL search into Wagtail core
Enhanced file manager
Summary
TBD
Implementation
TBD
Skills
TBD
Mentors
TBD
Aims
TBD
Automated page accessibility tests
Summary
We want Wagtail to have automated checks for common accessibility issues as part of the page publishing process.
Implementation
This would involve deciding on an accessibility checker to integrate with Wagtail, creating a prototype integration, testing it with users of Wagtail, and refining the user experience of the automated tests so it can start to be used on real-world websites.
Skills
Django, JavaScript, HTML. Bonus: user experience, visual design
Mentors
Thibaud Colas
Aims
Create an integrated accessibility testing experience that fits well within a CMS workflow, works well for end users, and can be used as an example for other platforms.
RTL support for Wagtail
Summary
Wagtail’s administration interface currently has poor support for right-to-left languages, such as Arabic and Hebrew. We have been wanting to fix this for a while (#1240, and now have a great opportunity to do so with CSS logical properties.
Implementation
We want to refactor Wagtail’s stylesheets to use CSS logical properties, Flexbox, and Grid layout, so the styles can be written agnostic to the writing direction of the language – browsers would then automatically display the correct end-user layout based on the target language.
Skills
HTML and CSS. Bonus: user experience, visual design, Django.
Mentors
Thibaud Colas
More advanced image size optimisations in Wagtail
Summary
Wagtail has quite good support for basic image optimisations, such as resizing images automatically or compressing file size. We want to push this further though, better leveraging modern formats such as WebP and AVIF, and having better support for <picture> and srcset HTML features to display a different image based on the viewport width.
Implementation
TBD
Skills
HTML, Django, Python.
Mentors
Thibaud Colas
Aims
- Explore support for AVIF image encoding in Python
- Implement Wagtail’s support for
pictureandsrcset(https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/issues/285)