wagtail/docs/releases/4.0.md

Wagtail 4.0 release notes - IN DEVELOPMENT

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What's new

Django 4.1 support

This release adds support for Django 4.1.

Global settings models

The new BaseGenericSetting base model class allows defining a settings model that applies to all sites rather than just a single site.

See the Settings documentation for more information. This feature was implemented by Kyle Bayliss.

Image renditions can now be prefetched by filter

When using a queryset to render a list of images, you can now use the prefetch_renditions() queryset method to prefetch the renditions needed for rendering with a single extra query, similar to prefetch_related. If you have many renditions per image, you can also call it with filters as arguments - prefetch_renditions("fill-700x586", "min-600x400") - to fetch only the renditions you intend on using for a smaller query. For long lists of images, this can provide a significant boost to performance. See for more examples. This feature was developed by Tidiane Dia and Karl Hobley.

Rich text improvements

As part of the page editor redesign project sponsored by Google, we have made a number of improvements to our rich text editor:

• Inline toolbar: The toolbar now shows inline, to avoid clashing with the page’s header.
• Command palette: Start a block with a slash ‘/’ to open the palette and change the text format.
• Character count: The character count is displayed underneath the editor, live-updating as you type. This counts the length of the text, not of any formatting.
• Paste to auto-create links: To add a link from your copy-paste clipboard, select text and paste the URL.
• Text shortcuts undo: The editor normally converts text starting with 1. to a list item. It’s now possible to un-do this change and keep the text as-is. This works for all Markdown-style shortcuts.
• RTL support: The editor’s UI now displays correctly in right-to-left languages.
• Focus-aware placeholder: The editor’s placeholder text will now follow the user’s focus, to make it easier to understand where to type in long fields.
• Empty heading highlight: The editor now highlights empty headings and list items by showing their type (“Heading 3”) as a placeholder, so content is less likely to be published with empty headings.
• Split and insert: rich text fields can now be split while inserting a new StreamField block of the desired type.

Live preview panel

Wagtail’s page preview is now available in a side panel within the page editor. This preview auto-updates as users type, and can display the page in three different viewports: mobile, tablet, desktop. The existing preview functionality is still present, moved inside the preview panel rather than at the bottom of the page editor. The auto-update delay can be configured with the WAGTAIL_AUTO_UPDATE_PREVIEW_INTERVAL setting. This feature was developed by Sage Abdullah.

Admin colour themes

In Wagtail 2.12, we introduced theming support for Wagtail’s primary brand colour. This has now been extended to almost all of Wagtail’s colour palette. View our documentation for more information, an overview of Wagtail’s customisable colour palette, and a live demo of the supported customisations. This was implemented by Thibaud Colas, under the page editor redesign project sponsored by Google.

Windows High Contrast mode support improvements

In Wagtail 2.16, we introduced support for Windows High Contrast mode (WHCM). This release sees a lot of improvements to our support, thanks to our new contributor Anuja Verma, who has been working on this as part of the Contrast Themes Google Summer of Code project, with support from Jane Hughes, Scott Cranfill, and Thibaud Colas.

• Improve help block styles with less reliance on communication via colour alone in forced colors mode
• Add a bottom border to top messages so they stand out from the header in forced colors mode
• Make progress bars’ progress visible in forced colors mode
• Make checkboxes visible in forced colors mode
• Display the correct color for icons in forced colors mode
• Add a border around modal dialogs so they can be identified in forced colors mode
• Ensure disabled buttons are distinguishable from active buttons in forced colors mode

UX unification and consistency improvements

In Wagtail 3.0, a new Page Editor experience was introduced, this release brings many of the UX and UI improvements to other parts of Wagtail for a more consistent experience. The bulk of these enhancements have been from Paarth Agarwal, who has been doing the UX Unification internship project alongside other Google Summer of Code participants. This internship has been sponsored by Torchbox with mentoring support from LB (Ben Johnston), Thibaud Colas and Helen Chapman.

• Breadcrumbs
  • Add Breadcrumbs to the Wagtail pattern library
  • Enhance new breadcrumbs so they can be added to any header or container element
  • Adopt new breadcrumbs on the page explorer (listing) view and the page chooser modal, remove legacy breadcrumbs code for move page as no longer used
  • Rename explorer_breadcrumb template tag to breadcrumbs as it is now used in multiple locations
  • Remove legacy (non-next) breadcrumbs no longer used, remove ModelAdmin usage of breadcrumbs completely and adopt consistent 'back' link approach
• Headers
  • Update classes and styles for the shared header templates to align with UI guidelines
  • Ensure the shared header template is more reusable, add ability to include classes, extra content and other blocks
  • Switch all report workflow, redirects, form submissions, site settings views to use Wagtail’s reusable header component
  • Resolve issues throughout Wagtail where the sidebar toggle would overlap header content on small devices
• Tabs
  • Add Tabs to the Wagtail pattern library
  • Adopt new Tabs component in the workflow history report page, removing the bespoke implementation there
• Dashboard (home) view
  • Migrate the dashboard (home) view header to the shared header template and update designs
  • Refresh designs for Home (Dashboard) site summary panels, use theme spacing and colours
  • Add support for RTL layouts and better support for small devices
  • Add CSS support for more than three summary items if added via customisations
• Page Listing view
  • Adopt the slim header in page listing views, with buttons moved under the "Actions" dropdown
  • Add convenient access to the translate page button in the parent "more" button

Other features

• Add clarity to confirmation when being asked to convert an external link to an internal one (Thijs Kramer)
• Convert the rest of the documentation to Markdown (Khanh Hoang, Vu Pham, Daniel Kirkham, LB (Ben) Johnston, Thiago Costa de Souza, Benedict Faw, Noble Mittal, Sævar Öfjörð Magnússon, Sandeep M A, Stefano Silvestri)
• Add base_url_path to ModelAdmin so that the default URL structure of app_label/model_name can be overridden (Vu Pham, Khanh Hoang)
• Add full_url to the API output of ImageRenditionField (Paarth Agarwal)
• Use InlinePanel's label when available for field comparison label (Sandil Ranasinghe)
• Drop support for Safari 13 by removing left/right positioning in favour of CSS logical properties (Thibaud Colas)
• Use FormData instead of jQuery's form.serialize when editing documents or images just added so that additional fields can be better supported (Stefan Hammer)
• Add informational Codecov status checks for GitHub CI pipelines (Tom Hu)
• Make it possible to reuse and customise Wagtail’s fonts with CSS variables (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Add better handling and informative developer errors for cross linking URLS (e.g. success after add) in generic views wagtail.admin.views.generic (Matt Westcott)
• Introduce wagtail.admin.widgets.chooser.BaseChooser to make it easier to build custom chooser inputs (Matt Westcott)
• Introduce JavaScript chooser module, including a SearchController class which encapsulates the standard pattern of re-rendering the results panel in response to search queries and pagination (Matt Westcott)
• Migrate Image and Document choosers to ne JavaScript chooser module (Matt Westcott)
• Add ability to select multiple items at once within bulk actions selections when holding shift on subsequent clicks (Hitansh Shah)
• Upgrade notification, shown to admins on the dashboard if Wagtail is out of date, will now link to the release notes for the closest minor branch instead of the latest patch (Tibor Leupold)
• Upgrade notification can now be configured to only show updates when there is a new LTS available via WAGTAIL_ENABLE_UPDATE_CHECK = 'lts' (Tibor Leupold)
• Implement redesign of the Workflow Status dialog, fixing accessibility issues (Steven Steinwand)
• Add the ability to change the number of images displayed per page in the image library (Tidiane Dia, with sponsorship from YouGov)
• Allow users to sort by different fields in the image library (Tidiane Dia, with sponsorship from YouGov)
• Add prefetch_renditions method to ImageQueryset for performance optimisation on image listings (Tidiane Dia, Karl Hobley)
• Add ability to define a custom get_field_clean_name method when defining FormField models that extend AbstractFormField (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Migrate Home (Dashboard) view to use generic Wagtail class based view (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Combine most of Wagtail’s stylesheets into the global core.css file (Thibaud Colas)
• Update ReportView to extend from generic wagtail.admin.views.generic.models.IndexView (Sage Abdullah)
• Introduce a wagtail.admin.viewsets.chooser.ChooserViewSet module to serve as a common base implementation for chooser modals (Matt Westcott)
• Add documentation for wagtail.admin.viewsets.model.ModelViewSet (Matt Westcott)
• Added multi-site support to the API (Sævar Öfjörð Magnússon)
• Add add_to_admin_menu option for ModelAdmin (Oliver Parker)
• Implement Fuzzy matching for Elasticsearch (Nick Smith)
• Cache model permission codenames in PermissionHelper (Tidiane Dia)
• Selecting a new parent page for moving a page now uses the chooser modal which allows searching (Viggo de Vries)
• Add clarity to the search indexing documentation for how boost works when using Postgres with the database search backend (Tibor Leupold)
• Updated django-filter version to support 23 (Yuekui)
• Use .iterator() in a few more places in the admin, to make it more stable on sites with many pages (Andy Babic)
• Migrate some simple React component files to TypeScript (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Deprecate the usage and documentation of the wagtail.contrib.modeladmin.menus.SubMenu class, provide a warning if used directing developers to use wagtail.admin.menu.Menu instead (Matt Westcott)
• Replace human-readable-date hover pattern with accessible tooltip variant across all of admin (Bernd de Ridder)
• Added WAGTAILADMIN_USER_PASSWORD_RESET_FORM setting for overriding the admin password reset form (Michael Karamuth)
• Prefetch workflow states in edit page view to to avoid queries in other parts of the view/templates that need it (Tidiane Dia)
• Remove the edit link from edit bird in previews to avoid confusion (Sævar Öfjörð Magnússon)
• Introduce new template fragment and block level enclosure tags for easier template composition (Thibaud Colas)
• Add a classnames template tag to easily build up classes from variables provided to a template (Paarth Agarwal)
• Clean up multiple eslint rules usage and configs to align better with the Wagtail coding guidelines (LB (Ben Johnston))
• Make ModelAdmin InspectView footer actions consistent with other parts of the UI (Thibaud Colas)
• Add support for Twitter and other text-only embeds in Draftail embed previews (Iman Syed, Paarth Agarwal)
• Use new modal dialog component for privacy settings modal (Sage Abdullah)
• Add menu_item_name to modify MenuItem's name for ModelAdmin (Alexander Rogovskyy, Vu Pham)
• Add an extra confirmation prompt when deleting pages with a large number of child pages (Jaspreet Singh)
• Replace latin abbreviations (i.e. / e.g.) with common English phrases so that documentation is easier to understand (Dominik Lech)
• Add shortcut for accessing StreamField blocks by block name with new blocks_by_name and first_block_by_name methods on StreamValue (Tidiane Dia, Matt Westcott)
• Add HTML-aware max_length validation and character count on RichTextField and RichTextBlock (Matt Westcott, Thibaud Colas)
• Remove is_parent kwarg in various page button hooks as this approach is no longer required (Paarth Agarwal)
• Improve security of redirect imports by adding a file hash (signature) check for so that any tampering of file contents between requests will throw a BadSignature error (Jaap Roes)

Bug fixes

• Fix issue where ModelAdmin index listings with export list enabled would show buttons with an incorrect layout (Josh Woodcock)
• Fix typo in ResumeWorkflowActionFormatter message (Stefan Hammer)
• Throw a meaningful error when saving an image to an unrecognised image format (Christian Franke)
• Remove extra padding for headers with breadcrumbs on mobile viewport (Steven Steinwand)
• Replace PageRevision with generic Revision model (Sage Abdullah)
• Ensure that custom document or image models support custom tag models (Matt Westcott)
• Ensure comments use translated values for their placeholder text (Stefan Hammer)
• Ensure the upgrade notification, shown to admins on the dashboard if Wagtail is out of date, content is translatable (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Only show the re-ordering option to users that have permission to publish pages within the page listing (Stefan Hammer)
• Ensure default sidebar branding (bird logo) is not cropped in RTL mode (Steven Steinwand)
• Add an accessible label to the image focal point input when editing images (Lucie Le Frapper)
• Remove unused header search JavaScript on the redirects import page (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Ensure non-square avatar images will correctly show throughout the admin (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Ignore translations in test files and re-include some translations that were accidentally ignored (Stefan Hammer)
• Show alternative message when no page types are available to be created (Jaspreet Singh)
• Prevent error on sending notifications for the legacy moderation process when no user was specified (Yves Serrano)
• Ensure aria-label is not set on locale selection dropdown within page chooser modal as it was a duplicate of the button contents (LB (Ben Johnston))
• Revise the ModelAdmin title column behaviour to only link to 'edit' if the user has the correct permissions, fallback to the 'inspect' view or a non-clickable title if needed (Stefan Hammer)
• Ensure that DecimalBlock preserves the Decimal type when retrieving from the database (Yves Serrano)
• When no snippets are added, ensure the snippet chooser modal would have the correct URL for creating a new snippet (Matt Westcott)
• ngettext in Wagtail's internal JavaScript internationalisation utilities now works (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Ensure the linting/formatting npm scripts work on Windows (Anuja Verma)
• Fix display of dates in exported xlsx files on macOS Preview and Numbers (Jaap Roes)
• Remove outdated reference to 30-character limit on usernames in help text (minusf)
• Resolve multiple form submissions index listing page layout issues including title not being visible on mobile and interaction with large tables (Paarth Agarwal)
• Ensure ModelAdmin single selection lists show correctly with Django 4.0 form template changes (Coen van der Kamp)
• Ensure icons within help blocks have accessible contrasting colours, and links have a darker colour plus underline to indicate they are links (Paarth Agarwal)
• Ensure consistent sidebar icon position whether expanded or collapsed (Scott Cranfill)
• Avoid redirects import error if the file had lots of columns (Jaap Roes)
• Resolve accessibility and styling issues with the expanding status panel (Sage Abdullah)
• Avoid 503 AttributeError when an empty search param q= is combined with other filters in the Images index view (Paritosh Kabra)
• Fix error with string representation of FormSubmission not returning a string (LB (Ben) Johnston)

Upgrade considerations

Changes to Page.serve() and Page.serve_preview() methods

As part of making previews available to non-page models, the serve_preview() method has been decoupled from the serve() method and extracted into the PreviewableMixin class. If you have overridden the serve() method in your page models, you will likely need to override serve_preview(), get_preview_template(), and/or get_preview_context() methods to handle previews accordingly. Alternatively, you can also override the preview_modes property to return an empty list to disable previews.

base_url_path keyword argument added to AdminURLHelper

The wagtail.contrib.modeladmin.helpers.AdminURLHelper class now accepts a base_url_path keyword argument on its constructor. Custom subclasses of this class should be updated to accept this keyword argument.

Dropped support for Safari 13

Safari 13 will no longer be officially supported as of this release, this deviates the current support for the last 3 version of Safari by a few months and was required to add better support for RTL languages.

PageRevision replaced with Revision

The PageRevision model has been replaced with a generic Revision model. If you use the PageRevision model in your code, make sure that:

• Creation of PageRevision objects should be updated to create Revision objects using the page's id as the object_id, the default Page model's content type as the base_content_type, and the page's specific content type as the content_type.
• Queries that use the PageRevision.objects manager should be updated to use the Revision.page_revisions manager.
• Revision queries that use Page.id should be updated to cast the Page.id to a string before using it in the query (e.g. by using str() or Cast("page_id", output_field=CharField())).
• Page queries that use PageRevision.page_id should be updated to cast the Revision.object_id to an integer before using it in the query (e.g. by using int() or Cast("object_id", output_field=IntegerField())).
• Access to PageRevision.page should be updated to Revision.content_object.

If you maintain a package across multiple Wagtail versions that includes a model with a ForeignKey to the PageRevision model, you can create a helper function to correctly resolve the model depending on the installed Wagtail version, for example:

from django.db import models
from wagtail import VERSION as WAGTAIL_VERSION


def get_revision_model():
    if WAGTAIL_VERSION >= (4, 0):
        return "wagtailcore.Revision"
    return "wagtailcore.PageRevision"


class MyModel(models.Model):
    # Before
    # revision = models.ForeignKey("wagtailcore.PageRevision")
    revision = models.ForeignKey(get_revision_model(), on_delete=models.CASCADE)

Page.get_latest_revision_as_page renamed to Page.get_latest_revision_as_object

The Page.get_latest_revision_as_page method has been renamed to Page.get_latest_revision_as_object. The old name still exists for backwards-compatibility, but calling it will raise a RemovedInWagtail50Warning.

AdminChooser replaced with BaseChooser

Custom choosers should no longer use wagtail.admin.widgets.chooser.AdminChooser which has been replaced with wagtail.admin.widgets.chooser.BaseChooser.

get_snippet_edit_handler moved to wagtail.admin.panels.get_edit_handler

The get_snippet_edit_handler function in wagtail.snippets.views.snippets has been moved to get_edit_handler in wagtail.admin.panels.

explorer_breadcrumb template tag has been renamed to breadcrumbs, move_breadcrumb has been removed

The explorer_breadcrumb template tag is not documented, however if used it will need to be renamed to breadcrumbs and the url_name is now a required arg.

The move_breadcrumb template tag is no longer used and has been removed.

wagtail.contrib.modeladmin.menus.SubMenu is deprecated

The wagtail.contrib.modeladmin.menus.SubMenu class should no longer be used for constructing submenus of the admin sidebar menu. Instead, import wagtail.admin.menu.Menu and pass the list of menu items as the items keyword argument.

Chooser widget JavaScript initialisers replaced with classes

The internal JavaScript functions createPageChooser, createSnippetChooser, createDocumentChooser and createImageChooser used for initialising chooser widgets have been replaced by classes, and user code that calls them needs to be updated accordingly:

• createPageChooser(id) should be replaced with new PageChooser(id)
• createSnippetChooser(id) should be replaced with new SnippetChooser(id)
• createDocumentChooser(id) should be replaced with new DocumentChooser(id)
• createImageChooser(id) should be replaced with newImageChooser(id)

URL route names for image, document and snippet apps have changed

If your code contains references to URL route names within the wagtailimages, wagtaildocs or wagtailsnippets namespaces, these should be updated as follows:

• wagtailimages:chooser is now wagtailimages_chooser:choose
• wagtailimages:chooser_results is now wagtailimages_chooser:choose_results
• wagtailimages:image_chosen is now wagtailimages_chooser:chosen
• wagtailimages:chooser_upload is now wagtailimages_chooser:create
• wagtailimages:chooser_select_format is now wagtailimages_chooser:select_format
• wagtaildocs:chooser is now wagtaildocs_chooser:choose
• wagtaildocs:chooser_results is now wagtaildocs_chooser:choose_results
• wagtaildocs:document_chosen is now wagtaildocs_chooser:chosen
• wagtaildocs:chooser_upload is now wagtaildocs_chooser:create
• wagtailsnippets:list, wagtailsnippets:list_results, wagtailsnippets:add, wagtailsnippets:edit, wagtailsnippets:delete-multiple, wagtailsnippets:delete, wagtailsnippets:usage, wagtailsnippets:history: These now exist in a separate wagtailsnippets_{app_label}_{model_name} namespace for each snippet model, and no longer take app_label and model_name as arguments.
• wagtailsnippets:choose, wagtailsnippets:choose_results, wagtailsnippets:chosen: These now exist in a separate wagtailsnippetchoosers_{app_label}_{model_name} namespace for each snippet model, and no longer take app_label and model_name as arguments.

Auto-updating preview

As part of the introduction of the new live preview panel, we have changed the WAGTAIL_AUTO_UPDATE_PREVIEW setting to be on (True) by default. This can still be turned off by setting it to False. The WAGTAIL_AUTO_UPDATE_PREVIEW_INTERVAL setting has been introduced for sites willing to reduce the performance cost of the live preview without turning it off completely.

Slim header on page listings

The page explorer listings now use Wagtail’s new slim header, replacing the previous large teal header. The parent page’s metadata and related actions are now available within the “Info” side panel, while the majority of buttons are now available under the Actions dropdown in the header, identically to the page create/edit forms.

Customising which actions are available and adding extra actions is still possible, but has to be done with the register_page_header_buttons hook, rather than register_page_listing_buttons and register_page_listing_more_buttons. Those hooks still work as-is to define actions for each page within the listings.

is_parent removed from page button hooks

• The following hooks construct_page_listing_buttons, register_page_listing_buttons, register_page_listing_more_buttons no longer accept the is_parent keyword argument and this should be removed.
• is_parent was the previous approach for determining whether the buttons would show in the listing rows or the page's more button, this can be now achieved with discrete hooks instead.

Changed CSS variables for admin colour themes

As part of our support for theming across all colors, we’ve had to rename or remove some of the pre-existing CSS variables. Wagtail’s indigo is now customisable with --w-color-primary, and the teal is customisable as --w-color-secondary. See for an overview of all customisable colours. Here are replaced variables:

• --color-primary is now --w-color-secondary
• --color-primary-hue is now --w-color-secondary-hue
• --color-primary-saturation is now --w-color-secondary-saturation
• --color-primary-lightness is now --w-color-secondary-lightness
• --color-primary-darker is now --w-color-secondary-400
• --color-primary-darker-hue is now --w-color-secondary-400-hue
• --color-primary-darker-saturation is now --w-color-secondary-400-saturation
• --color-primary-darker-lightness is now --w-color-secondary-400-lightness
• --color-primary-dark is now --w-color-secondary-600
• --color-primary-dark-hue is now --w-color-secondary-600-hue
• --color-primary-dark-saturation is now --w-color-secondary-600-saturation
• --color-primary-dark-lightness is now --w-color-secondary-600-lightness
• --color-primary-lighter is now --w-color-secondary-100
• --color-primary-lighter-hue is now --w-color-secondary-100-hue
• --color-primary-lighter-saturation is now --w-color-secondary-100-saturation
• --color-primary-lighter-lightness is now --w-color-secondary-100-lightness
• --color-primary-light is now --w-color-secondary-50
• --color-primary-light-hue is now --w-color-secondary-50-hue
• --color-primary-light-saturation is now --w-color-secondary-50-saturation
• --color-primary-light-lightness is now --w-color-secondary-50-lightness

We’ve additionally removed all --color-input-focus and --color-input-focus-border variables, as Wagtail’s form fields no longer have a different color on focus.

WAGTAILDOCS_DOCUMENT_FORM_BASE and WAGTAILIMAGES_IMAGE_FORM_BASE must inherit from BaseDocumentForm / BaseImageForm

Previously, it was valid to specify an arbitrary model form as the WAGTAILDOCS_DOCUMENT_FORM_BASE / WAGTAILIMAGES_IMAGE_FORM_BASE settings. This is no longer supported; these forms must now inherit from wagtail.documents.forms.BaseDocumentForm and wagtail.images.forms.BaseImageForm respectively.