As of December 28th, 2024, this website visible at rtl.chrisadams.me.uk, is a WordPress blog. I ended up using it out of convenience after wasting too much of my life faffing around with building static site generators, and abortive attempts at hand-built CMSs.
I’ve tried using Wagtail a few times to build these CMS’s too, but never really got into a habit of using them compared to a basic WordPress blog.
Over the last few years though, the Wagtail CMS has become progressivelly more and more impressive, and I’m increasingly involved in that community, so I think it would be nice to start using in 2025 again.
I’ve since learned that Wagtail has a nifty project template feature, which I think makes it possible to have an out of the box experience that ends up feeling something as nice as the WordPress one. Even if there isn’t anywhere near the same ecosystem as WordPress, I think Wagtail as a framework for building blog-like website products is getting really, really impressive.
What I wish existed
If I was younger and had more free time, this is what I’d build:
- a Wagtail project template for blogging, designed work with SQLite by default, followed by Postgres.
- an adapted theme from the WordPress 202x project, where a new, well designed default theme is released each year, like the recent Twenty Twenty Five theme. Having a familiar, good looking theme would make it much easier to migrate across from existing WordPress sites, and give a good target for development. Converting themes from one CMS ecosystem to another is fairly common.
- A good search experience, ideally using the nicer search features offered by Postgres and supported in Django where available. This is somewhere I feel WordPress is quite weak by default, because with MySQL rich search support in applications that use doesn’t seem to be anywhere near as common as I see with Postgres. Technically SQlite could support this too, but I’ve struggled to find Django library support for SQLite search features.
- an easy deploy story, with good support for use of object storage, compute and database as resources you can consume at independent rates. These are now available from a wide range of providers
- a default editor experience that demonstrates the slick user experience using streamfield can offer, when you look at how WordPress represents blocks of content on a page, it’s easy to see the appeal of Wagtail’s powerful Streamfield model. In general, I think it’s a well thought out model, but it takes quite some investment of time to create a good setup that demonstrates the value.
- good support for markdown, sharing code snippets and quotebacks, for common short-form blogging. For me at least, these tend to be the things I jot down and would want to share anyway, as they’re the ones I end up dropping into Obsidian already.