On May 31st, Lab Digital and Torchbox organised a short sprint with one goal: releasing Wagtail Personalisation support to the open source community.
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About one year ago, Torchbox and Lab Digital got together in Oxford, to discuss personalisation possibilities of Wagtail and brainstorm about future functionalities that it should offer.
As a follow up, Lab Digital started development of the module at the end of 2016, as a result of an internal project to explore personalisation possibilities in the open source space. Wagtail CMS was the obvious choice to start building upon, of course.
Last Wednesday, Torchbox and Lab Digital made an effort to make the project ready for open source publication and release it to the open source community, as well as work on the future roadmap of Wagxperience — OnModus joined to bring additional UX expertise for this as well.
The result of this can be seen at at https://github.com/LabD/wagtail-personalisation
We are very interested in your feedback! Note there might be a few rough edges that need to be resolved before releasing version 1.0 — PR’s welcome!
Wagtail Personalisation is already being used for a project under development for Girl Effect, the international NGO. Their Girl Effect Mobile platform — which has reached more than 19 million people in over 60 countries — will use Wagtail Personalisation to deliver customised content based on gender, age, location and device.
Getting started
Wagtail Personalisation is compatible with Django 1.11 and Wagtail 1.10, and can be installed in existing Wagtail projects.
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Have a look at the documentation for an in depth guide for setting up the module in your project!
In case you have any questions, join the #personalisation channel on the Wagtail Slack.
Why?
Personalisation is a hot topic in the User Experience field. It allows publishers to be more relevant for their customers, by showing content based on things they know about the visitor, including behaviour on the website.
Implementing these types of User Experiences is something that usually requires commercial software, like the Sitecore or Adobe suites.
These suites tend to be expensive (both licences and implementation effort) and not open source. They are therefore not easily accessible for all organisations.
Also, in our experience the commercial suites contain an overwhelming amount of features and technologies, that ask a lot of organisations in terms of both resources and the organisation’s digital maturity.
So, in order to solve these problems, we decided to implement a simple personalisation module for our favourite CMS, Wagtail, and release this open source.