wagtail/docs/releases/2.17.md

Wagtail 2.17 release notes - IN DEVELOPMENT

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What's new

Page editor redesign

Here are other changes related to the redesign:

• Switch the Wagtail branding font to a system font stack (Steven Steinwand)
• Remove most uppercased text styles from admin UI (Paarth Agarwal)
• Convert all UI code to CSS logical properties for Right-to-Left (RTL) language support (Thibaud Colas)

Removal of special-purpose field panel types

The panel types StreamFieldPanel, RichTextFieldPanel, ImageChooserPanel, DocumentChooserPanel and SnippetChooserPanel have been phased out, and can now be replaced with FieldPanel. Additionally, PageChooserPanel is only required when passing a page_type or can_choose_root, and can otherwise be replaced with FieldPanel. In all cases, FieldPanel will now automatically select the most appropriate form element. This feature was developed by Matt Westcott.

Permission-dependent FieldPanels

FieldPanel now accepts a permission keyword argument to specify that the field should only be available to users with a given permission level. This feature was developed by Matt Westcott and sponsored by Google as part of Wagtail's page editor redevelopment.

Other features

• Upgrade ESLint and Stylelint configurations to latest shared Wagtail configs (Thibaud Colas)
• Major updates to frontend tooling; move Node tooling from Gulp to Webpack, upgrade to Node v16 and npm v8, eslint v8, stylelint v14 and others (Thibaud Colas)
• Change comment headers’ date formatting to use browser APIs instead of requiring a library (LB (Ben Johnston))
• Lint with flake8-comprehensions and flake8-assertive, including adding a pre-commit hook for these (Mads Jensen, Dan Braghis)
• Add black configuration and reformat code using it (Dan Braghis)
• Remove UI code for legacy browser support: polyfills, IE11 workarounds, Modernizr (Thibaud Colas)
• Remove redirect auto-creation recipe from documentation as this feature is now supported in Wagtail core (Andy Babic)
• Remove IE11 warnings (Gianluca De Cola)
• Replace content_json TextField with content JSONField in PageRevision (Sage Abdullah)
• Remove replace_text management command (Sage Abdullah)
• Replace data_json TextField with data JSONField in BaseLogEntry (Sage Abdullah)
• Remove the legacy Hallo rich text editor as it has moved to an external package (LB (Ben Johnston))
• Increase the size of checkboxes throughout the UI, and simplify their alignment (Steven Steinwand)
• Adopt MyST for parsing documentation written in Markdown, replaces recommonmark (LB (Ben Johnston), Thibaud Colas)
• Installing docs extras requirements in CircleCI so issues with the docs requirements are picked up earlier (Thibaud Colas)
• Remove core usage of jinjalint and migrate to curlylint to resolve dependency incompatibility issues (Thibaud Colas)
• Switch focus outlines implementation to :focus-visible for cross-browser consistency (Paarth Agarwal)
• Migrate multiple documentation pages from RST to MD (Vibhakar Solanki, LB (Ben Johnston))
• Add documentation for defining custom form validation on models used in Wagtail's modelAdmin (Serafeim Papastefanos)
• Update README.md logo to work for GitHub dark mode (Paarth Agarwal)

Bug fixes

• Update django-treebeard dependency to 4.5.1 or above (Serafeim Papastefanos)
• When using simple_translations ensure that the user is redirected to the page edit view when submitting for a single locale (Mitchel Cabuloy)
• When previewing unsaved changes to Form pages, ensure that all added fields are correctly shown in the preview (Joshua Munn)
• When Documents (e.g. PDFs) have been configured to be served inline via WAGTAILDOCS_CONTENT_TYPES & WAGTAILDOCS_INLINE_CONTENT_TYPES ensure that the filename is correctly set in the Content-Disposition header so that saving the files will use the correct filename (John-Scott Atlakson)
• Improve the contrast of the “Remember me” checkbox against the login page’s background (Steven Steinwand)
• Group permission rows with custom permissions no longer have extra padding (Steven Steinwand)
• Make sure the focus outline of checkboxes is fully around the outer border (Steven Steinwand)
• Consistently set aria-haspopup="menu" for all sidebar menu items that have sub-menus (LB (Ben Johnston))
• Make sure aria-expanded is always explicitly set as a string in sidebar (LB (Ben Johnston))
• Use a button element instead of a link for page explorer menu item, for the correct semantics and behavior (LB (Ben Johnston))

Upgrade considerations

Removed warning in Internet Explorer (IE11)

• IE11 support was officially dropped in Wagtail 2.15, as of this release there will no longer be a warning shown to users of this browser.
• Wagtail is fully compatible with Microsoft Edge, Microsoft’s replacement for Internet Explorer. You may consider using its IE mode <https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/deployedge/edge-ie-mode>_ to keep access to IE11-only sites, while other sites and apps like Wagtail can leverage modern browser capabilities.

Replaced content_json TextField with content JSONField in PageRevision

• The content_json field in the PageRevision model has been renamed to content.
• The field now internally uses JSONField instead of TextField.
• If you have a large number of PageRevision objects, running the migrations might take a while.

Replaced data_json TextField with data JSONField in BaseLogEntry

• The data_json field in the BaseLogEntry model has been renamed to data.
• The field now internally uses JSONField instead of TextField.
• The default empty value for the field has been changed from "" to {}.
• This change also affects BaseLogEntry subclasses, i.e. PageLogEntry and ModelLogEntry.
• If you have a large number of objects for these models, running the migrations might take a while.

Hallo legacy rich text editor has moved to an external package

• Hallo was deprecated in Wagtail v2.0 (February 2018) and has had only a minimal level of support since then.
• If you still require Hallo for your Wagtail installation, you will need to install the Wagtail Hallo editor legacy package.
• We encourage all users of the Hallo editor to take steps to migrate to the new Draftail editor as this external package is unlikely to have ongoing maintenance.
• window.registerHalloPlugin will no longer be created on the page editor load, unless the legacy package is installed.

Phasing-out of special-purpose field panel types

As of this release, the use of special-purpose field panel types such as StreamFieldPanel and ImageChooserPanel is being phased out, and developers will generally expect to be able to use a plain FieldPanel instead. For this reason, developers of third-party packages implementing their own field panel types are recommended to follow suit and ensure that their code also works with FieldPanel. The steps for doing this will depend on the package's functionality, but in general:

• If the panel sets a custom template, your code should instead define a Widget class that produces your desired HTML rendering.
• If the panel provides a widget_overrides method, your code should instead call register_form_field_override so that the desired widget is always selected for the relevant model field type.
• If the panel provides a get_comparison_class method, your code should instead call wagtail.admin.compare.register_comparison_class to register the comparison class against the relevant model field type.

If you do continue to use a custom panel class, note that the template context for panels derived from BaseChooserPanel has changed - the context variable is_chosen, and the variable name given by the panel's object_type_name property, are no longer available on the template. The only available variables are now field and show_add_comment_button. If your template depends on these additional variables, you will need to pass them explicitly by overriding the render_as_field method.

ModelAdmin forms must subclass WagtailAdminModelForm

When overriding the get_form_class method of a ModelAdmin CreateView or EditView to pass a custom form class, that form class must now inherit from wagtail.admin.forms.models.WagtailAdminModelForm. Passing a plain Django ModelForm subclass is no longer valid.