Wagtail 2.6 release notes

August 1, 2019

What’s new

Accessibility targets and improvements

Wagtail now has official accessibility support targets: we are aiming for compliance with WCAG2.1, AA level. WCAG 2.1 is the international standard which underpins many national accessibility laws.

Wagtail isn’t fully compliant just yet, but we have made many changes to the admin interface to get there. We thank the UK Government (in particular the CMS team at the Department for International Trade), who commissioned many of these improvements.

Here are changes which should make Wagtail more usable for all users regardless of abilities:

  • Increase font-size across the whole admin (Beth Menzies, Katie Locke)

  • Improved text colour contrast across the whole admin (Beth Menzies, Katie Locke)

  • Added consistent focus outline styles across the whole admin (Thibaud Colas)

  • Ensured the ‘add child page’ button displays when focused (Helen Chapman, Katie Locke)

This release also contains many big improvements for screen reader users:

  • Added more ARIA landmarks across the admin interface and welcome page for screen reader users to navigate the CMS more easily (Beth Menzies)

  • Improved heading structure for screen reader users navigating the CMS admin (Beth Menzies, Helen Chapman)

  • Make icon font implementation more screen-reader-friendly (Thibaud Colas)

  • Removed buggy tab order customisations in the CMS admin (Jordan Bauer)

  • Screen readers now treat page-level action dropdowns as navigation instead of menus (Helen Chapman)

  • Fixed occurrences of invalid HTML across the CMS admin (Thibaud Colas)

  • Add empty alt attributes to all images in the CMS admin (Andreas Bernacca)

  • Fixed focus not moving to the pages explorer menu when open (Helen Chapman)

We’ve also had a look at how controls are labelled across the UI for screen reader users:

  • Add image dimensions in image gallery and image choosers for screen reader users (Helen Chapman)

  • Add more contextual information for screen readers in the explorer menu’s links (Helen Chapman)

  • Make URL generator preview image alt translatable (Thibaud Colas)

  • Screen readers now announce “Dashboard” for the main nav’s logo link instead of Wagtail’s version number (Thibaud Colas)

  • Remove duplicate labels in image gallery and image choosers for screen reader users (Helen Chapman)

  • Added a label to the modals’ “close” button for screen reader users (Helen Chapman, Katie Locke)

  • Added labels to permission checkboxes for screen reader users (Helen Chapman, Katie Locke)

  • Improve screen-reader labels for action links in page listing (Helen Chapman, Katie Locke)

  • Add screen-reader labels for table headings in page listing (Helen Chapman, Katie Locke)

  • Add screen reader labels for page privacy toggle, edit lock, status tag in page explorer & edit views (Helen Chapman, Katie Locke)

  • Add screen-reader labels for dashboard summary cards (Helen Chapman, Katie Locke)

  • Add screen-reader labels for privacy toggle of collections (Helen Chapman, Katie Locke)

Again, this is still a work in progress – if you are aware of other existing accessibility issues, please do open an issue if there isn’t one already.

Other features

  • Added support for short_description for field labels in modeladmin’s InspectView (Wesley van Lee)

  • Rearranged SCSS folder structure to the client folder and split them approximately according to ITCSS. (Naomi Morduch Toubman, Jonny Scholes, Janneke Janssen, Hugo van den Berg)

  • Added support for specifying cell alignment on TableBlock (Samuel Mendes)

  • Added more informative error when a non-image object is passed to the image template tag (Deniz Dogan)

  • Added ButtonHelper examples in the modelAdmin primer page within documentation (Kalob Taulien)

  • Multiple clarifications, grammar and typo fixes throughout documentation (Dan Swain)

  • Use correct URL in API example in documentation (Michael Bunsen)

  • Move datetime widget initialiser JS into the widget’s form media instead of page editor media (Matt Westcott)

  • Add form field prefixes for input forms in chooser modals (Matt Westcott)

  • Removed version number from the logo link’s title. The version can now be found under the Settings menu (Thibaud Colas)

  • Added “don’t delete” option to confirmation screen when deleting images, documents and modeladmin models (Kevin Howbrook)

  • Added branding_title template block for the admin title prefix (Dillen Meijboom)

  • Added support for custom search handler classes to modeladmin’s IndexView, and added a class that uses the default Wagtail search backend for searching (Seb Brown, Andy Babic)

  • Update group edit view to expose the Permission object for each checkbox (George Hickman)

  • Improve performance of Pages for Moderation panel (Fidel Ramos)

  • Added process_child_object and exclude_fields arguments to Page.copy() to make it easier for third-party apps to customise copy behaviour (Karl Hobley)

  • Added Page.with_content_json(), allowing revision content loading behaviour to be customised on a per-model basis (Karl Hobley)

  • Added construct_settings_menu hook (Jordan Bauer, Quadric)

  • Fixed compatibility of date / time choosers with wagtail-react-streamfield (Mike Hearn)

  • Performance optimization of several admin functions, including breadcrumbs, home and index pages (Fidel Ramos)

Bug fixes

  • ModelAdmin no longer fails when filtering over a foreign key relation (Jason Dilworth, Matt Westcott)

  • The Wagtail version number is now visible within the Settings menu (Kevin Howbrook)

  • Scaling images now rounds values to an integer so that images render without errors (Adrian Brunyate)

  • Revised test decorator to ensure TestPageEditHandlers test cases run correctly (Alex Tomkins)

  • Wagtail bird animation in admin now ends correctly on all browsers (Deniz Dogan)

  • Explorer menu no longer shows sibling pages for which the user does not have access (Mike Hearn)

  • Admin HTML now includes the correct dir attribute for the active language (Andreas Bernacca)

  • Fix type error when using --chunk_size argument on ./manage.py update_index (Seb Brown)

  • Avoid rendering entire form in EditHandler’s repr method (Alex Tomkins)

  • Add empty alt attributes to HTML output of Embedly and oEmbed embed finders (Andreas Bernacca)

  • Clear pending AJAX request if error occurs on page chooser (Matt Westcott)

  • Prevent text from overlapping in focal point editing UI (Beth Menzies)

  • Restore custom “Date” icon for scheduled publishing panel in Edit page’s Settings tab (Helen Chapman)

  • Added missing form media to user edit form template (Matt Westcott)

  • Page.copy() no longer copies child objects when the accessor name is included in exclude_fields_in_copy (Karl Hobley)

  • Clicking the privacy toggle while the page is still loading no longer loads the wrong data in the page (Helen Chapman)

  • Added missing is_stored_locally method to AbstractDocument (jonny5532)

  • Query model no longer removes punctuation as part of string normalisation (William Blackie)

  • Make login test helper work with user models with non-default username fields (Andrew Miller)

  • Delay dirty form check to prevent “unsaved changes” warning from being wrongly triggered (Thibaud Colas)

Upgrade considerations

Removed support for Python 3.4

Python 3.4 is no longer supported as of this release; please upgrade to Python 3.5 or above before upgrading Wagtail.

Icon font implementation changes

The icon font implementation has been changed to be invisible for screen-reader users, by switching to using Private Use Areas Unicode code points. All of the icon classes (icon-user, icon-search, etc) should still work the same, except for two which have been removed because they were duplicates:

  • icon-picture is removed. Use icon-image instead (same visual).

  • icon-file-text-alt is removed. Use icon-doc-full instead (same visual).

For a list of all available icons, please see the UI Styleguide.