Since we first came across Wagtail we've been impressed by the work done by our friends at Torchbox. They've built an exceptional product and have been doing great at accepting contributions from the wider open source community.
Wagtail is our CMS of choice for the Praekelt Foundation Incubator for Free Basics and we were delighted when we were able to partner with Torchbox on this project earlier this year.
The core Wagtail CMS team stretches from the UK to Australia and New Zealand. They've been working together for close to 2 years now. Over the last few months we've been entertaining the idea of enabling the core team to come together for the first time.
And it's happened! We're really pleased to have helped Tom, Matt and Karl from Torchbox UK, Josh from Springload in New Zealand and Tim from Takeflight Australia meet face to face for the first time! They're sprinting with our Molo team this week in Cape Town. Molo is a platform that allows any organisation to deliver rich, interactive content to mobile phones in low-bandwidth environments. It is built on top of Django and Wagtail.
Tom Dyson, Torchbox's Technical Director, said "It's amazing for us to
meet Josh and Tim in real life, having collaborated with them online
across timezones for nearly two years. Github, Slack and Google
Hangouts are fantastic tools but something different happens when
we're in the same physical space, and we're already feeling the
benefits. It's also been great for us to see Praekelt's work first
hand - Molo is a very impressive project and we're so pleased that
Wagtail is a part of it."
Yesterday we had a show and tell session to see what is being done with Wagtail, both by Praekelt Foundation and by other Wagtail teams worldwide.
Following the show and tell session we've outlined the following items that are going to be worked on the over the following days:
Translations
Our sites are always offered in a number of languages other than English. This means that we need support for fantastic translation work flows in the CMS. Since we often deal with medical information, this content needs to go through a strenuous review process. Our team at Praekelt Foundation has built an initial prototype implementation of translations in Wagtail which met our needs. This initial work is now helping shape the direction for official translation support in Wagtail CMS. We're proud to be able to contribute to this important work.
React Native, Wagtail APIs
We recognise that the mobile landscape is changing rapidly and we're charging ahead in preparation. Josh has shared (and open-sourced) a demo of a React Native application that connects to the Wagtail API to retrieve the relevant pieces of content.
This is important work for us, data coverage is a major barrier to entry to health workers across the developing work. An Android phone is great but if one is without data coverage most essential information still remains inaccessible. We're excited about the prospect of being able to enable community health workers to take essential and current content offline with them as they visit clinics and patients.
Content Workflows
We want to be sure that the content we provide is the absolute best content available. This means that most of our medical content needs to go through a process of review and approval. This ties closely to translations, each of which needs to go through the same process. We're looking at making a workflow process pluggable for Wagtail CMS. Making it optional for the situations that call for it but staying out of the way for situations where it is not needed.
We're excited for the week ahead and to spend time with like-minded developers in Cape Town whilst improving the open source Wagtail offering .
This blog post was written by Simon de Haan, Praekelt Foundation's Head of Engineering.
