Most of us have had the experience of loving a CMS at first, but souring over time, as the limitations and shortcomings come to light. We have had this experience too many times during our careers, as both users and developers of content management systems. What if something better could be built, which would withstand the test of time, and still be loved after years?

Wagtail 1.0 was released give years ago, and since then, it has emerged as the most popular CMS for the Django web framework. Wagtail and Django are both written in Python, one of the most popular programming languages and ecosystems in the world. Django powers sites like Instagram, Pinterest, The Washington Post, and Wagtail is used by major players like the U.K.'s National Health System, Google's blog, The Wharton School, several of NASA's sites, and many more. Wagtail takes a different approach from most CMS's: there's no quick start installation, and you will need a developer. Wagtail challenges you to think of the shape and structure of your content up front, but is flexible enough to adapt as your content needs change.

Accessibility, user experience, search, and scalability aren't afterthoughts in Wagtail: they are first order features. Wagtail also features a mobile friendly admin designed by content creators, a StreamField for structured authorship to avoid overloading a body field, and beautiful WYSIWYG called Draftail. Draftail stores all of its content in a JSON structured format rather than raw HTML, avoiding the many back-and-forth conversion problems prevalent in WYSIWYGs.

Tom will give an introduction to Wagtail, its philosophy, and why his Drupal shop decided to pivot from PHP to create a Python/Django based framework. Tim will show how it is being used to save lives here in Philadelphia, by powering our regional A.A. website.