Wagtail 1.8 is designated a Long Term Support (LTS) release. Long Term Support releases will continue to receive maintenance updates as necessary to address security and data-loss related issues, up until the next LTS release (typically a period of 8 months).
Access to pages can now be restricted based on user accounts and group membership, rather than just through a shared password. This makes it possible to set up intranet-style sites via the admin, with no additional coding. This feature was developed by Shawn Makinson, Tom Miller, Luca Perico and Matt Westcott.
Previously, any user with edit permission over a page and its descendants was able to delete them all as a single action, which led to the risk of accidental deletions. To guard against this, the permission rules have been revised so that a user with basic permissions can only delete pages that have no children; in order to delete a whole subtree, they must individually delete each child page first. A new "bulk delete" permission type has been added which allows a user to delete pages with children, as before; superusers receive this permission implicitly, and so there is no change of behaviour for them.
Wagtail now supports Elasticsearch 5. See :ref:`wagtailsearch_backends_elasticsearch` for configuration details. This feature was developed by Karl Hobley.
Breadcrumb links within the admin are now limited to the portion of the page tree that covers all pages the user has permission over. As with the changes to the explorer sidebar menu in Wagtail 1.6, this is a step towards supporting full multi-tenancy (where multiple sites on the same Wagtail installation can be fully isolated from each other through permission configuration). This feature was developed by Jeffrey Chau, Robert Rollins and Matt Westcott.
Updated tutorial
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The ":doc:`Your first Wagtail site </getting_started/tutorial>`" tutorial has been extensively updated to cover concepts such as dynamic page listings, template context variables, and tagging. This update was contributed by Scot Hacker, with additions from Matt Westcott.
* Added support for specifying custom HTML attributes for table rows on ModelAdmin index pages. See :ref:`modeladmin_get_extra_attrs_for_row` (Andy Babic)
* Added new StreamField block type ``StaticBlock`` for blocks that occupy a position in a stream but otherwise have no configuration; see :ref:`streamfield_staticblock` (Benoît Vogel)
* Added ``exclude_from_explorer`` attribute to the ``ModelAdmin`` class to allow hiding instances of a page type from Wagtail's explorer views (Andy Babic)
* Added ``above_login``, ``below_login``, ``fields`` and ``login_form`` customisation blocks to the login page template - see :doc:`/advanced_topics/customisation/admin_templates` (Tim Heap)
* Added the ability to override the default index settings for Elasticsearch. See :ref:`wagtailsearch_backends_elasticsearch` (PyMan Claudio Marinozzi)
* Extra options for the Elasticsearch constructor should be now defined with the new key ``OPTIONS`` of the ``WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS`` setting (PyMan Claudio Marinozzi)
Additionally, third-party code that accesses the Filter and Rendition models directly should note the following and make updates where applicable:
*``Filter`` will no longer be a Django model as of Wagtail 1.9, and as such, ORM operations on it (such as ``save()`` and ``Filter.objects``) are deprecated. It should be instantiated and used as an in-memory object instead - for example, ``flt, created = Filter.objects.get_or_create(spec='fill-100x100')`` should become ``flt = Filter(spec='fill-100x100')``.
* The ``filter`` field of Rendition models is no longer in use; lookups should instead be performed on the ``filter_spec`` field, which contains a filter spec string such as ``'fill-100x100'``.
The ``get_image_model`` function should now be imported from ``wagtail.wagtailimages`` rather than ``wagtail.wagtailimages.models``. See :ref:`custom_image_model_referring_to_image_model`.
As a precaution against accidental data loss, this release introduces a new "bulk delete" permission on pages, which can be set through the Settings -> Groups area. Non-administrator users must have this permission in order to delete pages that have children; a user without this permission would have to delete each child individually before deleting the parent. By default, no groups are assigned this new permission. If you wish to restore the previous behaviour, and don't want to configure permissions manually through the admin interface, you can do so with a data migration. Create an empty migration using ``./manage.py makemigrations myapp --empty --name assign_bulk_delete_permission`` (replacing ``myapp`` with the name of one of your project's apps) and edit the migration file to contain the following:
The ``wagtail.contrib.wagtailfrontendcache.backends.CloudflareBackend`` module has been updated to use Cloudflare's v4 API, replacing the previous v1 implementation (which is `unsupported as of November 9th, 2016 <https://www.cloudflare.com/docs/client-api/>`_). The new API requires users to supply a *zone identifier*, which should be passed as the ``ZONEID`` field of the ``WAGTAILFRONTENDCACHE`` setting:
For the Elasticsearch backend, all extra keys defined in ``WAGTAILSEARCH_BACKENDS`` are passed directly to the Elasticsearch constructor. All these keys now should be moved inside the new ``OPTIONS`` dictionary. The old behaviour is still supported, but deprecated.