Wagtail 3.0rc1 released

[Matthew Westcott]

Hi all,
I'm delighted to announce that the first release candidate of Wagtail 3.0 is now available!

This version bump is marked by a few significant changes for the project:

* A major design refresh. The admin interface has been updated with a new sidebar, font stack, tab design and page editor. Further updates are expected for the next release, scheduled for August.
* Architectural improvements. Notably, imports such as wagtail.core.models are now simplified to wagtail.models, and it is no longer necessary to use dedicated panel types for choosers and StreamField. Additionally, StreamField and other areas of Wagtail using JSON data representations have been migrated to use Django's native JSONField support.
* A move to semantic versioning. As of this release, major version increments will be used more frequently, to more clearly communicate breaking changes in code and notable user-facing UI changes, and assist site owners and package maintainers in planning upgrades. As such, we expect to release a Wagtail 4.0 in August incorporating the remaining planned updates to the page editor.

For the full details of this release, see: https://docs.wagtail.org/en/latest/releases/3.0.html

With a major release like this, we're especially keen to see it tested against real-world sites to help us catch any issues in advance of the final 3.0 release (scheduled for the first half of May), and so we'd like to invite you to try it out against your development and staging sites. Be sure to check the upgrade consideration notes, as they're more sizable than usual.

To install, set wagtail==3.0rc1 in your project's requirements. For general advice on upgrading, see: https://docs.wagtail.org/en/stable/releases/upgrading.html

We'd love to hear your feedback, good or bad - on the discussion at https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/discussions/8362, on GitHub issues where appropriate, or on #watercooler on Slack.

Cheers,
- Matt