Wagtail Sprint Reykjavik

We here at Overcast have been using Wagtail CMS for more than two years now. It’s an open source CMS originally created by the UK agency Torchbox, based on Django, “the web framework for perfectionists with deadlines”.

The team here at Overcast was not unfamiliar with Django as it had been used for various team member projects since 2010. We had been looking for a good CMS to replace Wordpress and similar systems since we felt that there were certain developer needs being unfulfilled within the Wordpress ecosystem. We stumbled upon Wagtail at version 0.4 and haven’t looked back since. Today all our website projects are implemented in Wagtail and our growing list of Wagtail sites showcases that.

When the team at Torchbox asked if we would consider hosting a Wagtail sprint in Reykjavik, we immediately felt that it was a natural step for us to get more involved in the fast-growing Wagtail community. So we said yes, and eventually a total of 15 people from 5 countries signed up, including four of our own staff here in Iceland.

The teams report their progress at the end of the sprint. Tom took a lot of photos.

The group split up in teams of about 2–4 people, to work on various issues and pull requests. Significant progress was made on various issues regarding performance, optimization, pluggable text editor architecture, React.js-based explorer menu and many more. A new Wagtail demo site was born to showcase the flexibility of Wagtail; Wagtail Bakery. It is still being actively developed on Github.

Our own Eiki working with Janneke from Lukkien (The Netherlands) and Thiebaud from Springload (He’s French but lives in Finland working for a New Zealand firm. It’s a long story.).

After the sprint, two of our team members offered to show interested attendees some of South Iceland highlights, such as Geysir hot spring and beautiful waterfalls.

Yes, we are still dry in this picture. It’s taken before we went behind the waterfall. The force of the water falling from the cliff and the direction of wind, made sure we got properly introduced to clean, sulfur free, Icelandic H2O. Yours truly number two from the right.

All in all it was a great experience to participate first hand in such a vibrant, active and professional open source community that Wagtail has become. We are happy to have participated in progressing the Wagtail project, but also to have made new friends and connections all around the world.

The next Wagtail sprint, Wagtail Space, will be hosted in Arnhem, The Netherlands March 21–25. We may not make it to The Netherlands but we hope to at least join the sprint remotely. See you then!