About the audience
Outreachy Internship update
Frankly, it’s been a bit more 5 weeks since I started the Outreachy internship. In that time, I’ve have become quite familiar with the Wagtail CMS and community. As mentioned in earlier updates, I’m tasked with documenting the CMS accessibility features. Explaining these to an everyday person outside could be handful but here’s how I try that:
What is Wagtail?
Simply put, Wagtail is a free to use and open-source content management system (CMS). In turn, a CMS is made to create, manage, and publish content on a website or web application. Many social media platforms could be considered as CMS to an extent, but a more typical example is WordPress. One difference is Wagtail is written in Python and incorporates Django. This allows more efficiency and security packages. You can read more on this: Wagtail vs WordPress.
To get a feel of content built with Wagtail looks like, see MadewithWagtail.
About the Wagtail Community
Again, Wagtail is open source. This means anyone can join in and contribute to its endless evolution. There’s usually a buzz on the slack workspace. There are contributors constantly on issues ranging from development, accessibility, languages, documentation and more.
The mentors and every other contributor I’ve communicated with, are super chilled. They’re usually so eager to help and ready to answer questions. Think of the community as a bunch of cool friends working on this project getting bigger by the day and they keep welcoming more friends to help with it.
The major headliner within the community is accessibility. In other words, any and everyone should be able to use Wagtail from anywhere. With that, Wagtail intends to be in line with ATAG 2.0.
Why document accessibility features?
This follows the ATAG 2.0 rules. Again, everyone using Wagtail should not only have access to these features and should know how and why they work.
So, who does this benefit?
To be honest, everyone. But in more nuanced environments, these are:
Developers: either contributing to Wagtail’s open-source development or building sites with Wagtail.
Contributors: people contributing to the open-source project need resources to stay updated on their work. art of the idea is to extend Wagtail’s documentation.
Wagtail CMS users: be it content editors, content managers, bloggers or casual users there’s a need for folks to be aware of the features will improve their work quality.
How am I doing this?
I talk about this in an earlier update. I’ve been learning a whole lot about the CMS and the community. Also, having one on one conversations with core contributors has been a boost. I’ve picked up how accessibility gets multifaceted in product building.
What’s next?
Getting better at using Wagtail as an editor, wrapping up the interviews and a first draft…