wagtail admin incompletely displayed

[Erik Romijn]

Hello all,

I wanted to try out wagtail, but ran into a problem early on. It seems some components of the admin are missing for me. Perhaps I've missed a step in the install somewhere, but I couldn't find any.

When I log in to the admin and attempt to edit the home page I see:

http://erik.io/j/wagtail1.png

So the title field is present, but all others are absent, so I'm unable to edit the page content. The web inspector below shows that this isn't simply a display issue: the HTML elements are simply absent. I can reproduce the problem in Chrome and Firefox, and my user is an admin. Editing the title and then publishing does show on the live homepage.

I tried to create a new page as documented in http://wagtail.readthedocs.org/en/latest/editor_manual/new_pages/index.html but the mentioned page type choice did not appear. Instead, it had me create another page of the homepage type, with only the title field visible.

I built the project according to http://wagtail.readthedocs.org/en/latest/getting_started/installation.html#a-basic-wagtail-installation

To be specific:

- I created a fresh virtualenv

- I installed wagtail 0.6 with Django 1.6.5 - I ran into some earlier difficulties using 1.7, so decided to stick to the known 1.6 for now

- I set my DJANGO_SETTINGS_MODULE to the dev settings

- I ran syncdb, migrate and then runserver

There are no 404s or other errors that I've noticed anywhere. I'm running Python 2.7.5 on Mac OS X 10.9.4.

Considered how early on this fails, I get the feeling I must have missed something obvious. Can anyone provide insights?

Erik

[Matthew Westcott]

Hi Erik,

What you see there is the expected behaviour - when you start a new project with the 'wagtail start' command, it intentionally gives you a bare-bones Homepage model consisting of just the title field, so that you can extend it according to your own requirements.

Have you tried out the demo site? <https://github.com/torchbox/wagtaildemo> That might be closer to what you're looking for... it's primarily designed to run under Vagrant, but it should be simple enough to get running without Vagrant too.

Cheers,
- Matt

[Erik Romijn]

Hi Matt,

Thanks for the clarification, that makes sense to me. I thought wagtail start would create a bunch of initial pages as well, but I used the demo now. That was indeed exactly what I was looking for.

I created PR #632 to add a note to the docs so that future developers don't run into the same confusion :)

Erik

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[Scot Hacker]

On Friday, September 12, 2014 12:10:46 PM UTC-7, Matthew Westcott wrote:

Hi Erik,

What you see there is the expected behaviour - when you start a new project with the 'wagtail start' command, it intentionally gives you a bare-bones Homepage model consisting of just the title field, so that you can extend it according to your own requirements.

Ah! I also spent an hour thinking I had made some mistake during installation. Nothing wrong with requiring devs to do their own data modeling - it's the Django way. But it's not the CMS way, so it's totally unexpected in this context, especially when every other part of the documentation, installation, and interface are so complete already. Just feels kind of jarring. 

I guess my recommendation would be to provide a sample enhancement of the HomePage model in the Getting Started docs.

Thanks,

Scot

[Matthew Westcott]

Fair point! A week or two back while setting up a fresh Wagtail build I realised that there's another factor that contributes to this... on a new project, the 'add new page' view (which users are strongly steered towards, by the "No pages have been created. Why not add one?" message) skips straight past the "choose a page type" screen, because there's only one choice at that point. As a result, there's nothing to introduce a new user to the concept of multiple page types, or alert them to the fact that creating a page of type 'Homepage' underneath the existing homepage probably isn't what they want to do.

Explaining this in the documentation would be a good start, but it would be even better if we could find a way to make this work intuitively, rather than relying on people to RTFM :-) I'll create a Github issue to see if there's a way we can improve this experience.

Cheers,
- Matt