Wagtail 1.11 release notes

June 30, 2017

What’s new

Explorer menu built with the admin API and React

After more than a year of work, the new explorer menu has finally landed! It comes with the following improvements:

  • View all pages - not just the ones with child pages.

  • Better performance, no matter the number of pages or levels in the hierarchy.

  • Navigate the menu via keyboard.

  • View Draft pages, and go to page editing, directly from the menu.

Beyond features, the explorer is built with the new admin API and React components. This will facilitate further evolutions to make it even faster and user-friendly. This work is the product of 4 Wagtail sprints, and the efforts of 16 people, listed here by order of first involvement:

  • Karl Hobley (Cape town sprint, admin API)

  • Josh Barr (Cape town sprint, prototype UI)

  • Thibaud Colas (Ede sprint, Reykjavík sprint)

  • Janneke Janssen (Ede sprint, Reykjavík sprint, Wagtail Space sprint)

  • Rob Moorman (Ede sprint, eslint-config-wagtail, ES6+React+Redux styleguide)

  • Maurice Bartnig (Ede sprint, i18n and bug fixes)

  • Jonny Scholes (code review)

  • Matt Westcott (Reykjavík sprint, refactorings)

  • Sævar Öfjörð Magnússon (Reykjavík sprint)

  • Eirikur Ingi Magnusson (Reykjavík sprint)

  • Harris Lapiroff (Reykjavík sprint, tab-accessible navigation)

  • Hugo van den Berg (testing, Wagtail Space sprint)

  • Olly Willans (UI, UX, Wagtail Space sprint)

  • Andy Babic (UI, UX)

  • Ben Enright (UI, UX)

  • Bertrand Bordage (testing, documentation)

Privacy settings on documents

Privacy settings can now be configured on collections, to restrict access to documents either by shared password or by user account. See: Private pages.

This feature was developed by Ulrich Wagner and Matt Westcott. Thank you to Wharton Research Data Services of The Wharton School for sponsoring this feature.

Other features

  • Optimised page URL generation by caching site paths in the request scope (Tobias McNulty, Matt Westcott)

  • The current live version of a page is now tracked on the revision listing view (Matheus Bratfisch)

  • Each block created in a StreamField is now assigned a globally unique identifier (Matt Westcott)

  • Mixcloud oEmbed pattern has been updated (Alice Rose)

  • Added last_published_at field to the Page model (Matt Westcott)

  • Added show_in_menus_default flag on page models, to allow “show in menus” to be checked by default (LB (Ben Johnston))

  • “Copy page” form now validates against copying to a destination where the user does not have permission (Henk-Jan van Hasselaar)

  • Allows reverse relations in RelatedFields for elasticsearch & PostgreSQL search backends (Lucas Moeskops, Bertrand Bordage)

  • Added oEmbed support for Facebook (Mikalai Radchuk)

  • Added oEmbed support for Tumblr (Mikalai Radchuk)

Bug fixes

  • Unauthenticated AJAX requests to admin views now return 403 rather than redirecting to the login page (Karl Hobley)

  • TableBlock options afterChange, afterCreateCol, afterCreateRow, afterRemoveCol, afterRemoveRow and contextMenu can now be overridden (Loic Teixeira)

  • The lastmod field returned by wagtailsitemaps now shows the last published date rather than the date of the last draft edit (Matt Westcott)

  • Document chooser upload form no longer renders container elements for hidden fields (Jeffrey Chau)

  • Prevented exception when visiting a preview URL without initiating the preview (Paul Kamp)

Upgrade considerations

Browser requirements for the new explorer menu

The new explorer menu does not support IE8, IE9, and IE10. The fallback experience is a link pointing to the explorer pages.

Caching of site-level URL information throughout the request cycle

The get_url_parts and relative_url methods on Page now accept an optional request keyword argument. Additionally, two new methods have been added, get_url (analogous to the url property) and get_full_url (analogous to the full_url) property. Whenever possible, these methods should be used instead of the property versions, and the request passed to each method. For example:

page_url = my_page.url

would become:

page_url = my_page.get_url(request=request)

This enables caching of underlying site-level URL information throughout the request cycle, thereby significantly reducing the number of cache or SQL queries your site will generate for a given page load. A common use case for these methods is any custom template tag your project may include for generating navigation menus. For more information, please refer to Page URLs.

Furthermore, if you have overridden get_url_parts or relative_url on any of your page models, you will need to update the method signature to support this keyword argument; most likely, this will involve changing the line:

def get_url_parts(self):

to:

def get_url_parts(self, *args, **kwargs):

and passing those through at the point where you are calling get_url_parts on super (if applicable).

See also: wagtail.core.models.Page.get_url_parts(), wagtail.core.models.Page.get_url(), wagtail.core.models.Page.get_full_url(), and wagtail.core.models.Page.relative_url()

“Password required” template for documents

This release adds the ability to password-protect documents as well as pages. The template used for the “password required” form is distinct from the one used for pages; if you have previously overridden the default template through the PASSWORD_REQUIRED_TEMPLATE setting, you may wish to provide a corresponding template for documents through the setting DOCUMENT_PASSWORD_REQUIRED_TEMPLATE. See: Private pages

Elasticsearch 5.4 is incompatible with ATOMIC_REBUILD

While not specific to Wagtail 1.11, users of Elasticsearch should be aware that the ATOMIC_REBUILD option is not compatible with Elasticsearch 5.4.x due to a bug in the handling of aliases. If you wish to use this feature, please use Elasticsearch 5.3.x or 5.5.x (when available).