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Two years of the Wagtail public roadmap

Our latest release marks two years of the public roadmap for the CMS and community

With the Wagtail 6.3 release a few days ago, we’ve reached two years of Wagtail having a published project roadmap! We started the roadmap as a follow-up to the Wagtail page editor project in 2022, and have kept at it ever since.

Our roadmap in numbers

Over those two years, we have tracked 8 releases following this process, and shipped an impressive 55 roadmap items! Those can be Wagtail features for developers or CMS users, or community initiatives like our community events.

You can view all the historical data in our Wagtail public roadmap GitHub project:

screenshot of recent wagtail roadmap entries in the project kanban board

Why we have a roadmap

Back in May we wrote about Keeping up with upcoming changes in Wagtail. The roadmap is essential there, effectively making some of our decision-making visible for people who have limited time to engage with contributor conversations. Wagtail users and stakeholders can learn about what features and projects we’re working on, what stage they’re in, and when we expect to bring them to you. This improves the project’s transparency for everyone.

For example, it allows us to reflect on how many roadmap items our team commits to compared to how many actually do ship in the intended release:

wagtail roadmap items over two years of releases, bar chart. v6.3: 6 items, v6.2: 4, v6.1: 4, v6.0: 10, v5.2: 8, v5.1: 7, v5.0: 8, v4.2: 8

We tend to give priority to releasing on schedule every three months, rather than with all possible improvements. Hence why specific roadmap items often spill over to subsequent releases. Over those two years, we’re at 85% of items shipping in their intended release. We recently started committing to fewer items to get that figure closer to 100%, based on feedback from our community.

Ways you can influence the roadmap

The roadmap is also public so you can influence it! Like all open source projects, Wagtail thrives thanks to input and contributions of all kinds. There are a lot of options on ways to give your input.

  • Review our roadmap-related RFCs (Request For Comment), published every 3 months, shortly around the release of a new version. Inspired by Python’s enhancement proposals (PEP) and Django’s DEPs, those Wagtail enhancement proposals are one of the simplest ways to have a say on upcoming feature.
  • Look at specific roadmap items marked “needs contributions”, such as our upcoming StreamField UX improvements and headless support improvements.

Feature sponsorship has been of huge benefit to Wagtail over the years. We currently have a number of features ready for sponsorship. Here are two highlights:

If there’s a specific improvement that would make a difference for your organization, do reach out!