Inside Wagtail's News Template - What Works, What's Broken, and What's Missing

Kumar Vanshaj — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 19:45:02 +0000

I spent several weeks reading the wagtail/news-template codebase for my Google Summer of Code application. This post shares what I found - what works, what is broken, and what could be better.

The wagtail/news-template homepage - dark mode enabled by default

What the starter kit is

The news-template is a Wagtail starter kit for news and media websites. It gives you article pages, topic filtering, pagination, search, and dark mode. Everything works out of the box. The design uses Tailwind CSS and is responsive.

What it does well

The content model is solid. ArticlePage supports authors, topics, publication dates, and hero images. The body is built from StreamField blocks. Editors can add sections, quotes, stats, and cards - no code needed.

The block system is flexible. FeaturedArticleBlock lets editors override an article's image, description, and CTA text. Topic filtering works via query parameters. It is a small but thoughtful detail.

What is broken or missing

Reading the code revealed several bugs.

Newsletter signup never submitted. The email input had no name attribute. The button was an <a> tag with no connection to the input. Every visitor who tried to sign up got no result. I fixed this in PR #107.

Mobile navigation links were broken. A regression left mobile nav links with empty href="" attributes. Users were redirected back to the current page. Fixed in PR #101.

FeaturedArticleBlock had an empty template. The block defined five fields but its template was a stub. It rendered raw block data instead of HTML. Fixed in PR #103.

Missing imports caused runtime errors. slugify was not imported in utils/models.py. Pagination exceptions were missing in news/models.py. Both caused NameError crashes.

Form fields lacked label elements. Inputs had no <label> elements. This is a WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility violation. Fixed in PR #99.

Test coverage was minimal. The project had three tests before my contribution. Core models, template tags, and views had no coverage at all.

What could be added

Author profile pages with bio and social links
RSS feed for articles
Open Graph meta tags for social sharing
Multilingual support

Final thoughts

The starter kit is a strong foundation. The content model and block system are well thought out. But several core features were broken. Contributing fixes taught me more about Wagtail than any tutorial could.

I Fixed a Silent Bug in an Open Source Project - Here's What I Learned

Kumar Vanshaj — Wed, 25 Mar 2026 16:27:50 +0000

The bug looked small. An email input in a footer. But it was completely broken.

I was exploring the wagtail/news-template codebase as part of my Google Summer of Code (GSoC) application. I found the newsletter signup in the footer. You could type your email. You could click "Sign up". Nothing happened.

Why it broke

The "Sign up" button was an <a> tag. It linked to an external URL. It had no connection to the input field.

The input also had no name attribute. In HTML, form fields without a name are never submitted. Even if a form existed, the value would be lost.

The fix

I wrapped the input and button in a <form> element. I set the action to the external signup URL. I used method="get" so the email becomes part of the URL as a query parameter.

I also added name="email" and required to the input.

<form action="{{ signup_url }}" method="get">
  <input type="email" name="email" required placeholder="Enter your email">
  <button type="submit">Sign up</button>
</form>

Three lines changed. The feature now works.

What I learned

Small bugs can break core features. This signup appeared on every page of the site. Every visitor who tried it got no result.

Reading HTML carefully matters. You don't always need to run code to spot a problem. The structure tells you what will happen.

Open source is a good place to practice this. Real codebases have real bugs. Fixing them teaches you more than tutorials.

If you are new to open source, start by reading templates and forms. Look for missing attributes. Look for buttons that don't submit. These bugs are common and easy to fix once you know what to look for.

DEV Community: Kumar Vanshaj