Our new product strategy for Wagtail

Today we’re publishing a new product strategy for Wagtail to guide our direction for product development over the next few years.

Wagtail has spent more than a decade holding its own against bigger, better-funded open source and commercial competitors. We’ve seen strong growth, with tens of thousands of sites built with the CMS, and many high-profile organisations placing their trust in Wagtail.

But the ground has shifted since late 2022, and the pace of change has accelerated. We needed to revisit the fundamentals. And we need an approach to AI adoption that isn’t just “AI first” with AI sparkle ✨ buttons everywhere in the CMS.

Long-term vision

Even in an uncertain world, we believe that the fundamentals still hold. We want Wagtail to be the obvious choice for organisations that genuinely care about security, a responsible approach to AI, and the impact of the technology they use on people and planet.

Playing to our strengths, we’re there for people who want to manage their CMS as code, with Python-flavoured engineering underpinning a “CMS + framework” value proposition to power advanced customisations and integrations.

It's clear that we need to support more and better ways for people to build with Wagtail that play nicely with the other tools and services they use, while providing the content governance capabilities they depend on (i.e. workflows, permissions, scheduling, versioning, audit trails, reporting and so on) and a first-class editor experience and admin UI for those that still want to use it.

The direction we are taking will focus product development on three pillars:

• Future-ready content management
• Deep integrations and customisations
• Developer Experience (DX) for humans and AI

AI is and will remain fully optional, opt-in, per our AI guiding principles. We acknowledge its transformational impact, but we also want a thoughtful, intentional, responsible approach to adoption.

What we’re doing next

We’ve updated our project roadmap for Wagtail 8.0 in August, with a new “write” API as the flagship feature. This API will make it much simpler for our users to initiate and complete content operations from outside the CMS, with more opportunities for automation and integrations.

In the short term, we’re also working on:

• DX with AI improvements, based on our recent AI for developers community survey.
• Security hardening, based on the excellent independent audit procured by the French government.
• Long-awaited flexibility in the base page content model. If you know, you know.

Get involved

The new product strategy is ambitious and it's a lot of work, but we can do this together—that’s the beauty of open source.

We want to grow the network of people and organisations involved in our community: from developers, contributors and maintainers to agencies, partners and CMS users. And we want to bring everyone together online at events like Wagtail Space 2026, or in-person like Wagtail Space NL.

For now, have a read of our new product strategy and let us know what you think.