Contributing to Wagtail

Issues

The easiest way to contribute to Wagtail is to tell us how to improve it! First, check to see if your bug or feature request has already been submitted at github.com/torchbox/wagtail/issues. If it has, and you have some supporting information which may help us deal with it, comment on the existing issue. If not, please create a new one, providing as much relevant context as possible. For example, if you’re experiencing problems with installation, detail your environment and the steps you’ve already taken. If something isn’t displaying correctly, tell us what browser you’re using, and include a screenshot if possible.

Pull requests

If you’re a Python or Django developer, fork and get stuck in! Send us a useful pull request and we’ll post you a t-shirt. We welcome all contributions, whether they solve problems which are specific to you or they address existing issues. If you’re stuck for ideas, pick something from the issue list, or email us directly on hello@wagtail.io if you’d like us to suggest something!

Coding guidelines

  • PEP8. We ask that all Python contributions adhere to the PEP8 style guide, apart from the restriction on line length (E501). The pep8 tool makes it easy to check your code, e.g. pep8 --ignore=E501 your_file.py.
  • Python 2 and 3 compatibility. All contributions should support Python 2 and 3 and we recommend using the six compatibility library (use the pip version installed as a dependency, not the version bundled with Django).
  • Tests. Wagtail has a suite of tests, which we are committed to improving and expanding. We run continuous integration at travis-ci.org/torchbox/wagtail to ensure that no commits or pull requests introduce test failures. If your contributions add functionality to Wagtail, please include the additional tests to cover it; if your contributions alter existing functionality, please update the relevant tests accordingly.

Styleguide

Developers working on the Wagtail UI or creating new UI components may wish to test their work against our Styleguide, which is provided as the contrib module “wagtailstyleguide”.

To install the styleguide module on your site, add it to the list of INSTALLED_APPS in your settings:

INSTALLED_APPS = (
   ...
   'wagtail.contrib.wagtailstyleguide',
   ...
)

At present the styleguide is static: new UI components must be added to it manually, and there are no hooks into it for other modules to use. We hope to support hooks in the future.

The styleguide doesn’t currently provide examples of all the core interface components; notably the Page, Document, Image and Snippet chooser interfaces are not currently represented.

Translations

Wagtail has internationalisation support so if you are fluent in a non-English language you can contribute by localising the interface.

Our preferred way to submit or contribute to a language translation is via Transifex.

If you do not want to use Transifex we also welcome pull requests of django.po files for any of the Wagtail modules.

Other contributions

We welcome contributions to all aspects of Wagtail. If you would like to improve the design of the user interface, or extend the documentation, please submit a pull request as above. If you’re not familiar with Github or pull requests, contact us directly and we’ll work something out.