Wagtail-Bird-Skinny

Meagen's Link List for Wagtail Beginners

July 28, 2021

I'll admit I'm 90% creating this list so I can remember where all the most helpful links were that I found while building and launching this portfolio site. As far as being a beginner goes, Wagtail provides a decent amount of support and ways to seek out help. If you happen to be a Django beginner as well, then things can get a bit dicey because often the Wagtail documentation assumes you know a few things about Django already. There are definitely some gaps though that many of these posts fill in nicely. Here's my list:

General Resources

Learnwagtail.com : Get yourself over to this site and hand over your money because both the paid course and the free tutorials on this site are one of the best ways to get up to speed on Wagtail.

Pythoneatstail.com : Another excellent resource for someone looking to kickstart a project with great pieces on building your project to support multiple languages. I ran into trouble with the deployment method used by this author though.

awesome-wagtail : One of the longest lists out there of Wagtail resources for you to tap into.

SEO

Wagtail SEO guide : I used pretty much every one of the tips in this guide. Very straightforward. If you buy the author's book, the urlpatterns code is a bit more up to date versus the free tutorials.

Wagtail basic SEO tips : I wound up using most of the tips from the guide above instead of the tips in this guide but I like that this author included an option for robots.txt that could served straight from the server.

Deployment

Launch Your Wagtail Website on Digital Ocean with Ubuntu 18 : This page is golden because it provides a nice layout of the steps involved with deploying your website and lets you enter the details for your project so you can just copy and paste them into the commandline. If you're wary of entering details like that into another person's site, you can always scrape the page and run it locally on your machine instead.

I deployed my portfolio site on Ubuntu 20, and the only issue I ran into with these steps was that exporting the DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE in my virtual environment didn't work. My project kept spinning up with the dev settings even though I made the production settings the default on the server. I wound up having to add a setting to my systemd file for gunicorn like this:

[Unit]
Description=gunicorn daemon
Requires=gunicorn.socket
After=network.target

[Service]
User=newuser
Group=www-data
WorkingDirectory=/home/newuser/yourprojectname
Environment="DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE=yourproject.settings.production"
ExecStart=/home/newuser/yourprojectname/.venv/bin/gunicorn \
        --access-logfile - \
        --workers 3 \
        --bind unix:/run/gunicorn.sock \
        yourprojectname.wsgi:application
Recommended packages

wagtailfontawesome : I'm not a designer, so I appreciate the shortcuts that Fontawesome provides when it comes to adding icons and symbols to my sites.

wagatilcodeblock : This package supports adding code blocks (like the one in the Deployment section) to your pages.

wagtail-metadata : A super simple package that gives you more control over the metadata used in your social previews and such.