wagtail/docs/releases/6.0.md

Wagtail 6.0 release notes - IN DEVELOPMENT

Unreleased

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What's new

Django 5.0 support

This release adds support for Django 5.0. The support has also been backported to Wagtail 5.2 LTS.

New developer tutorial

A new developer tutorial series has been added to the documentation. This series builds upon the pre-existing , going through the creation and deployment of a portfolio website.

This tutorial series was created by Damilola Oladele as part of the Google Season of Docs program, with support from Meagen Voss, and Thibaud Colas. We also thank Storm Heg, Kalob Taulien, Kátia Nakamura, Mariusz Felisiak, and Rachel Smith for their support and feedback as part of the project.

Universal listings

Following design improvements to the page listing view, Wagtail now provides a unified search and filtering interface for all listings. This will improve navigation capabilities, particularly for sites with a large number of pages or where content tends to use a flat structure.

In this release, the universal listing interface is available for Pages, Snippets, and Forms.

This feature was developed by Ben Enright, Matt Westcott, Nick Lee, Thibaud Colas, and Sage Abdullah.

Right-to-left language support

The admin interface now supports right-to-left languages, such as Persian, Arabic, Hebrew. Though there are still some areas that need improvement, all admin views will now be displayed in the correct direction. Review our UI guidelines for guidance on supporting right-to-left languages in admin interface customizations.

Thank you to Thibaud Colas, Badr Fourane, and Sage Abdullah for their work on this long-requested improvement.

Accessibility checker in page editor

The built-in accessibility checker now displays as a side panel within page and snippet editors supporting preview. The new "Checks" side panel only shows accessibility-related issues for pages with the userbar enabled in this release, but will be updated to support any content checks in the future.

This feature was implemented by Nick Lee, Thibaud Colas, and Sage Abdullah.

Other features

• Added search_index option to StreamField blocks to control whether the block is indexed for searching (Vedant Pandey)
• Remember previous location on returning from page add/edit actions (Robert Rollins)
• Update settings file in project settings to address Django 4.2 deprecations (Sage Abdullah)
• Improve layout and accessibility of the image URL generator page, reduce reliance on JavaScript (Temidayo Azeez)
• Allow UniqueConstraint in place of unique_together for {class}~wagtail.models.TranslatableMixin's system check (Temidayo Azeez, Sage Abdullah)
• Make use of IndexView.get_add_url() in snippets index view template (Christer Jensen, Sage Abdullah)
• Allow Page.permissions_for_user() to be overridden by specific page types (Sébastien Corbin)
• Improve visual alignment of explore icon in Page listings for longer content (Krzysztof Jeziorny)
• Add extra_actions blocks to Snippets and generic index templates (Bhuvnesh Sharma)
• Added page types usage report (Jhonatan Lopes)
• Add support for defining panels / edit_handler on ModelViewSet (Sage Abdullah)
• Use a single instance of PagePermissionPolicy in wagtail.permissions module (Sage Abdullah)
• Add max tag length validation for multiple uploads (documents/images) (Temidayo Azeez)
• Ensure expanded side panel does not overlap form content for most viewports (Chiemezuo Akujobi)
• Add ability to modify the default ordering for the page explorer view (Shlomo Markowitz)
• Remove overly verbose image captions in image listings for screen readers (Sage Abdullah)
• Ensure screen readers and dictation tools can more easily navigate bulk actions in images, documents and page listings by streamlining labels and descriptions (Sage Abdullah)
• Remove support for Safari 14 (Thibaud Colas)
• Add ability to click to copy the URL in the image URL generator page (Sai Srikar Dumpeti)
• Add ability to filter by page type and date updated in the page listing view (Matt Westcott)
• Add ability to filter by owner and site in the page listing view (Matt Westcott)
• Show edit as a main action in generic history and usage views (Sage Abdullah)
• Make styles for header buttons consistent (Sage Abdullah)
• Improve styles of slim header's search and filters (Sage Abdullah)
• Change page listing's add button to icon-only (Sage Abdullah)
• Add sublabel to breadcrumbs, including history, usage, and inspect views (Sage Abdullah)
• Standardise search form placeholder to 'Search…' (Sage Abdullah)
• Use SlugInput on all SlugFields by default (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Show character counts on RichTextBlock with max_length (Elhussein Almasri)
• Move locale selector in generic IndexView to a filter (Sage Abdullah)
• Add optional caption field to TypedTableBlock (Tommaso Amici, Cynthia Kiser)
• Switch the TableBlock header controls to a field that requires user input (Bhuvnesh Sharma, Aman Pandey, Cynthia Kiser)
• Add WAGTAILADMIN_LOGIN_URL setting to allow customising the login URL (Neeraj Yetheendran)
• Replace legacy dropdown component with new Tippy dropdown-button (Thibaud Colas)
• Add ability to filter by existence of child pages in the page listing view (Matt Westcott)
• Polish dark theme styles and update color tokens (Thibaud Colas, Rohit Sharma)
• Keep database state of pages and snippets updated while in draft state (Stefan Hammer)
• Add DrilldownController and w-drilldown component to support drilldown menus (Thibaud Colas)

Bug fixes

• Update system check for overwriting storage backends to recognise the STORAGES setting introduced in Django 4.2 (phijma-leukeleu)
• Prevent password change form from raising a validation error when browser autocomplete fills in the "Old password" field (Chiemezuo Akujobi)
• Ensure that the legacy dropdown options, when closed, do not get accidentally clicked by other interactions wide viewports (CheesyPhoenix, Christer Jensen)
• Add a fallback background for the editing preview iframe for sites without a background (Ian Price)
• Preserve whitespace in rendered comments (Elhussein Almasri)
• Remove search logging from project template so that new projects without the search promotions module will not error (Matt Westcott)
• Ensure text only email notifications for updated comments do not escape HTML characters (Rohit Sharma)
• Use the latest draft when copying an unpublished page for translation (Andrey Nehaychik)
• Make Workflow and Aging Pages reports only available to users with page-related permissions (Rohit Sharma)
• Make searching on specific fields work correctly on Elasticsearch when boost is in use (Matt Westcott)
• Use a visible border and background color to highlight active formatting in the rich text toolbar (Cassidy Pittman)
• Ensure image focal point box can be removed (Gunnar Scherf)
• Ensure that Snippets search results correctly use the index_results.html or index_results_template_name override on initial load (Stefan Hammer)
• Avoid error when attempting to moderate a page drafted by a now deleted user (Dan Braghis)
• Do not show multiple error messages when editing a Site to use existing hostname and port (Rohit Sharma)
• Avoid error when exporting Aging Pages report where a page has an empty last_published_by_user (Chiemezuo Akujobi)
• Ensure Page querysets support using alias and specific (Tomasz Knapik)
• Ensure workflow dashboard panels work when the page/snippet is missing (Sage Abdullah)
• Ensure ActionController explicitly checks for elements that allow select functionality (Nandini Arora)
• Prevent a ValueError with FormSubmissionsPanel on Django 5.0 when creating a new form page (Matt Westcott)
• Add ability to customise a page's copy form including an auto-incrementing slug example (Neeraj Yetheendran)
• Avoid duplicate entries in "Recent edits" panel when copying pages (Matt Westcott)
• Prevent TitleFieldPanel from raising an error when the slug field is missing or read-only (Rohit Sharma)
• Ensure that the close button on the new dialog designs is visible in the non-message variant (Nandini Arora)
• Ensure the sidebar account toggle has no duplicate accessible labels (Nandini Arora)
• Avoid text overflow issues in comment replies and scroll position issues for long comments (Rohit Sharma)
• Ensure that page listing re-ordering messages and accessible labels can be translated (Aman Pandey, LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Resolve multiple issues with page listing re-ordering using keyboard and screen readers (Aman Pandey)
• Remove 'Page' from page types filter on aging pages report (Matt Westcott)
• Prevent page types filter from showing other non-Page models that match by name (Matt Westcott)
• Ensure MultipleChooserPanel modal works correctly when USE_THOUSAND_SEPARATOR is True for pages with ids over 1,000 (Sankalp, Rohit Sharma)
• When using an empty table header (th) for visual spacing, ensure this is ignored by accessibility tooling (V Rohitansh)
• Ensure the panel anchor button sizes meet accessibility guidelines for minimum dimensions (Nandini Arora)
• Raise a 404 for bulk actions for models which don't exist instead of throwing a 500 error (Alex Tomkins)
• Raise a SiteSetting.DoesNotExist error when retrieving settings for an unrecognised site (Nick Smith)
• Ensure that defaulted or unique values declared in exclude_fields_in_copy are correctly excluded in new copies, resolving to the default value (Elhussein Almasri)
• Ensure that default_ordering set on IndexView is preserved if ModelViewSet does not specify an explicit ordering (Cynthia Kiser)

Documentation

• Document, for contributors, the use of translate string literals passed as arguments to tags and filters using _() within templates (Chiemezuo Akujobi)
• Document all features for the Documents app in one location, see (Neeraj Yetheendran)
• Add section to testing docs about creating pages and working with page content (Mariana Bedran Lesche)
• Add more nuance to the database recommendations in (Jadesola Kareem)
• Add clarity that MultipleChooserPanel may require a chooser viewset and how the functionality is expected to work (Andy Chosak)
• Clarify where documentation build commands should be run (Nikhil S Kalburgi)
• Add missing import to tutorial BlogPage example (Salvo Polizzi)
• Update contributing guide documentation and GitHub templates to better support new contributors (Thibaud Colas)
• Add more CSS authoring guidelines (Thibaud Colas)
• Update MyST documentation parser library to v 2.0.0 (Neeraj Yetheendran)
• Add documentation writing guidelines for intersphinx / external links (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Add Page model reference get_children documentation (Salvo Polizzi)

Maintenance

• Update BeautifulSoup upper bound to 4.12.x (scott-8)
• Migrate initialization of classes (such as body.ready) from multiple JavaScript implementations to one Stimulus controller w-init (Chiemezuo Akujobi)
• Adopt the usage of of translate string literals using arg=_('...') in all wagtailadmin module templates (Chiemezuo Akujobi)
• Migrate the contrib styleguide index view to a class-based view (Chiemezuo Akujobi)
• Update djhtml to 3.0.6 (Matt Westcott)
• Migrate the contrib settings edit view to a class-based view (Chiemezuo Akujobi, Sage Abdullah)
• Remove django-pattern-library upper bound in testing dependencies (Sage Abdullah)
• Split up functions in Elasticsearch backend for easier extensibility (Marcel Kornblum, Cameron Lamb, Sam Dudley)
• Relax draftjs_exporter dependency to allow using version 5.x (Sylvain Fankhauser)
• Refine styling of listings, account settings panels and the block chooser (Meli Imelda)
• Remove icon font support (Matt Westcott)
• Remove deprecated SVG icons (Matt Westcott)
• Remove icon font styles (Thibaud Colas)
• Migrate account editing view to a class-based view (Kehinde Bobade)
• Upgrade frontend tooling to use Node 20 (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Upgrade ruff and replace black with ruff format (John-Scott Atlakson)
• Update Willow upper bound to 2.x (Dan Braghis)
• Refactor page explorer index template to extend generic index template (Sage Abdullah)
• Replace template components implementation with standalone laces library (Tibor Leupold)
• Refactor snippets index view and template to make better use of generic IndexView (Sage Abdullah)
• Introduce an internal {% formattedfield %} tag to replace direct use of wagtailadmin/shared/field.html (Matt Westcott)
• Update Telepath dependency to 0.3.1 (Matt Westcott)
• Allow ActionController to have a noop method to more easily leverage standalone Stimulus action options (Nandini Arora)
• Upgrade to latest TypeScript and Storybook (Thibaud Colas, Sage Abdullah)
• Turn on skipLibCheck for TypeScript (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Refactor documents listing view to use generic IndexView (Sage Abdullah)
• Support for the Stimulus CloneController to auto clear the added content after a set duration (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Refactor images listing view to use generic IndexView (Sage Abdullah)
• Refactor form pages listing view to use generic IndexView (Sage Abdullah)
• Update Stylelint, our linting configuration, Sass, and related code changes (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Simplify browserslist and browser support documentation for maintainers (Thibaud Colas)
• Relax django-taggit dependency to allow 5.0 (Sylvain Fankhauser)
• Fix various warnings when building docs (Cynthia Kiser)
• Upgrade sphinxcontrib-spelling to 7.x for Python 3.12 compatibility (Matt Westcott)
• Move logic for django-filters filtering into BaseListingView (Matt Westcott)
• Remove or replace legacy CSS classes: visuallyhidden, visuallyvisible, divider-after, divider-before, inline, inline-block, block, u-hidden, clearfix, reordering, overflow (Thibaud Colas)
• Prevent future issues with icon.html end-of-file newlines (Thibaud Colas)
• Rewrite styles using legacy c-, o-, u-, t-, is- prefixes (Thibaud Colas)
• Remove invalid CSS styles / Sass selector concatenation (Thibaud Colas)
• Refactor listing views to share more queryset ordering logic (Matt Westcott)
• Remove initTooltips in favour of Stimulus controller (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Enhance the Stimulus InitController to allow for custom event dispatching when ready (Aditya, LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Remove inline script usage for comment initialization and adopt an event listener/dispatch approach for better CSP compliance (Aditya, LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Migrate styleguide ad-hoc JavaScript to use styles only to avoid CSP issues (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Update Jest version - frontend tooling (Nandini Arora)
• Remove non-functional and inaccessible auto-focus on first field in page create forms (LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Migrate the unsaved form checks & confirmation trigger to Stimulus UnsavedController (Sai Srikar Dumpeti, LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Reduce gap between snippets and generic views/templates (Sage Abdullah)
• Migrate page listing menu re-ordering (drag & drop) from jQuery inline scripts to OrderableController (Aman Pandey, LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Clean up scss variable usage, remove unused variables and mixins, adopt more core token variables (Jai Vignesh J, Nandini Arora, LB (Ben) Johnston)
• Migrate Image URL generator views to class based views (Rohit Sharma)
• Use Django's FileResponse when serving files such as Images or Documents (Jake Howard)

Upgrade considerations - removal of deprecated features from Wagtail 4.2 - 5.1

Features previously deprecated in Wagtail 4.2, 5.0 and 5.1 have been fully removed. For additional details on these changes, see:

• Wagtail 4.2 release notes
• Wagtail 5.0 release notes
• Wagtail 5.1 release notes

The most significant changes are highlighted below.

Removal of ModelAdmin app

The wagtail.contrib.modeladmin app has been removed. If you wish to continue using it, it is available as the external package wagtail-modeladmin.

Support for Elasticsearch 5 and 6 dropped

The Elasticsearch 5 and 6 backends have been removed. If you are using one of these backends, you will need to upgrade to Elasticsearch 7 or 8 before upgrading to Wagtail 6.0.

StreamField no longer requires use_json_field=True

The use_json_field argument to StreamField is no longer required, and can be removed. StreamField now consistently uses JSONField for its database representation, and Wagtail 5.0 required older TextField-based streams to be migrated. As such, use_json_field no longer has any effect.

Other removals

• The WAGTAILADMIN_GLOBAL_PAGE_EDIT_LOCK setting is no longer recognised and should be replaced with WAGTAILADMIN_GLOBAL_EDIT_LOCK.
• The Query model is no longer part of the wagtail.search module; it can now be found in the optional wagtail.contrib.search_promotions app.
• The wagtail.models.UserPagePermissionsProxy class and get_pages_with_direct_explore_permission, get_explorable_root_page and users_with_page_permission functions have been removed; equivalent functionality exists in the wagtail.permission_policies.pages.PagePermissionPolicy class.
• The permission_type field of the GroupPagePermission model has been removed; the permission field (a foreign key to Django's Permission model) should be used instead.
• The legacy moderation system used prior to the introduction of workflows in Wagtail 2.10 has been removed. Any moderation requests still in the queue from before this time will be lost.
• The Wagtail icon font has been removed; any direct usage of this needs to be converted to SVG icons.
• Various unused icons deprecated in Wagtail 5.0 have been removed.
• The partial_match argument on SearchField and on search methods has been removed. AutocompleteField and the autocomplete method should be used instead.
• The insert_editor_css hook has been removed; the insert_global_admin_css hook should be used instead.
• The wagtail.contrib.frontend_cache module now supports azure-mgmt-cdn version 10 and azure-mgmt-frontdoor version 1 as its minimum supported versions.
• The Task.page_locked_for_user method has been removed; Task.locked_for_user should be used instead.
• The {% icon %} template tag no longer accepts class_name as an argument; classname should be used instead.
• The wagtail.tests.utils module has been removed and can now be found at wagtail.test.utils.
• The template wagtailadmin/shared/field_as_li.html has been removed, and should be replaced with wagtailadmin/shared/field.html enclosed in an <li> tag.
• The custom client-side events wagtail:show and wagtail:hide on showing and hiding dialogs have been removed; w-dialog:show and w-dialog:hide should be used instead.
• The global Javascript definitions headerSearch, initTagField, cancelSpinner and unicodeSlugsEnabled have been removed; these should be replaced with Stimulus controllers.

Upgrade considerations - changes affecting all projects

Upgrade considerations - deprecation of old functionality

Removed support for Django < 4.2

Django versions prior to 4.2 are no longer supported as of this release; please upgrade to Django 4.2 or above before upgrading Wagtail.

Upgrade considerations - changes affecting Wagtail customisations

SlugInput widget is now the default for SlugField fields

In Wagtail 5.0 a new SlugInput admin widget was added to support slug behavior in Page and Page copy forms. This widget was included by default if the promote_panels fields layout was customised, causing confusion.

As of this release, any forms that inherit from WagtailAdminModelForm (includes page and snippet model editing) will now use the SlugInput by default on all models with SlugField fields.

Previously, the widget had to be explicitly added.

from wagtail.admin.widgets.slug import SlugInput
# ... other imports

class MyPage(Page):
    promote_panels = [
        FieldPanel("slug", widget=SlugInput),
        # ... other panels
    ]

Keeping the widget as above is fine, but will no longer be required. The JavaScript field behavior will be included by default.

# ... imports

class MyPage(Page):
    promote_panels = [
        FieldPanel("slug"),
        # ... other panels
    ]

If you do not want this for some reason, you will now need to declare a different widget.

from django.forms.widgets import TextInput
# ... other imports

class MyPage(Page):
    promote_panels = [
        FieldPanel("slug", widget=TextInput), # use a plain text field
        # ... other panels
    ]

Changed handling of database updates of non-live Page objects or subclasses of DraftStateMixin

Prior to this release, the database record of a Page or any subclass of DraftStateMixin either contained the live data (if published), the state of the last published version (if unpublished), or the state of the first revision (if never published). Subsequent draft edits would create new Revision records, but the main database record would not be updated. As a result, the database record could lag substantially behind the current state of the object, causing unexpected behaviour particularly when unique constraints are in use.

As of this release, the database record of a non-live object will be updated to reflect the draft state of the object. This is unlikely to have a visible effect on existing sites, since the admin backend works with the Revision records while the site front-end typically filters out non-live objects. However, any code that relies on the database record being untouched by draft edits (for example, using it to store a specific approved / archived state of the page) may need to be updated.

Upgrade considerations - changes to undocumented internals

filter_queryset and get_filtered_queryset methods no longer return filters

The undocumented internal methods filter_queryset(queryset) on wagtail.admin.views.generic.IndexView, and get_filtered_queryset() on wagtail.admin.views.reports.ReportView, now return just the filtered queryset; previously they returned a tuple of (filters, queryset). The filterset instance is always available as the cached property self.filters.

Deprecation of the undocumented window.enableDirtyFormCheck function

The admin frontend window.enableDirtyFormCheck will be removed in a future release and as of this release only supports the basic initialization.

The previous approach was to call a window global function as follows.

window.enableDirtyFormCheck('.my-form', { alwaysDirty: true, confirmationMessage: 'You have unsaved changes'});

The new approach will be data attribute driven as follows.

<form
  method="POST"
  data-controller="w-unsaved"
  data-action="w-unsaved#submit beforeunload@window->w-unsaved#confirm change->w-unsaved#check keyup->w-unsaved#check"
  data-w-unsaved-confirm-value="This page has unsaved changes." // equivalent to `confirmationMessage`.
  data-w-unsaved-force-value="true" // equivalent to `alwaysDirty`.
  data-w-unsaved-watch-value="edits comments" // can add 'comments' if comments is enabled, defaults to only 'edits'.
  >
  ... form contents
</form>

data-tippy-content attribute support will be removed

The implementation of the JS tooltips have been fully migrated to the Stimulus w-tooltip/TooltipController implementation.

Dynamic support for any data-tippy-content="..." usage will be removed this release, for example, within chooser modals or dynamic html response data.

Some minimal backwards compatibility support for data-tippy-content will work until a future release, but only in the initial HTML response on a page.

Data attributes

These HTML data attributes were not documented, but if any custom code implemented custom tooltips, these will need to be changed.

Old	New	Notes
	data-controller="w-tooltip"	Required, new addition for any usage
data-tippy-content="{% trans 'History' %}"	data-w-tooltip-content-value="{% trans 'History' %}"	Required
data-tippy-offset="[12, 24]"	data-w-tooltip-offset-value="[12, 24]"	Optional, default is no offset
data-tippy-placement="top"	data-w-tooltip-placement-value="top"	Optional, default is 'bottom'

Deprecated WidgetWithScript base widget class

The undocumented WidgetWithScript class that used inline scripts to attach JavaScript to widgets will be removed in a future release.

This approach creates security risks and will not be compliant with CSP support, instead it's recommended that all similar requirements migrate to use the recommended Stimulus JS integration approach.

A full example of how to build this has been documented on (extending client-side behavior)[extending_client_side_stimulus_widget], a basic example is below.

Old

from django.forms import Media, widgets


class CustomRichTextArea(WidgetWithScript, widgets.Textarea):
    def render_js_init(self, id_, name, value):
        return f"window.customEditorInitScript({json.dumps(id_)});"

    @property
    def media(self):
        return Media(js=["vendor/custom-editor.js"])

New

from django.forms import Media, widgets


class CustomRichTextArea(widgets.Textarea):
    def build_attrs(self, *args, **kwargs):
        attrs = super().build_attrs(*args, **kwargs)
        attrs['data-controller'] = 'cusom-editor'

    @property
    def media(self):
        return Media(js=["vendor/custom-editor.js","js/custom-editor-controller.js"])

// myapp/static/js/custom-editor-controller.js

class CustomEditorController extends window.StimulusModule.Controller {
    connect() {
        window.customEditorInitScript(this.element.id);
    }
}

window.wagtail.app.register('color', CustomEditorController);