Blog
Or, brain dumps and musings.
On cooking a Cashew Nut Roast for Christmas dinner
A time honoured recipe, a classic piece of folk wisdom, and a small revelation.
Using Wagtail's ChooserViewSets without breaking default behaviour
A little tip to avoid the old head-scratching when using viewsets.
The magic elf
On the pleasant unexpectedness of how others view oneself.
Adding an advanced table block to Wagtail
The native TableBlock that ships with Wagtail is great, but sometimes we need to go deeper.
Headless CMS with Contentful and Next.js
On being pleasantly surprised when using some new tech.
Twenty five years making websites
I built my first website in June 1996, and I haven't looked back. Until now of course.
Google-friendly sitemaps for multilingual Wagtail sites
Multilingual Wagtail sites need a little help to conform to the Google Search Console sitemap format - here's how to do it.
Wagtailtrans and editing page siblings
Enhance the CMS UX experience when using Wagtailtrans by adding action menu buttons to edit translated page siblings.
Don’t show invalid options
Write a little extra code to help your CMS editors navigate the maze of content editing.
The intern test
Design your editing screens to help guide a new editor through the process as much as possible from the start.
Make everything editable
Keep everyone happy by making everything editable, reducing the need for developer input into minor text changes.
Verbose in the code, simple in the UI
Keep your UI field names simple for the CMS editor, whilst protecting against namespace collisions in the code.
Favour consistency over novelty
Ease the cognitive load by reusing familiar patterns.
UX for the CMS user
Tips which I find make life that little bit easier and understandable for CMS editors, and hopefully lead to better websites all round.
Querysets for Wagtail field panels
Ever wanted to pass a dynamic queryset to a Wagtail FieldPanel instead of static choices? Here's how to do it.
Adding footnotes to Wagtail
Adventures in adding a new footnote entity type to the native Wagtail rich text editor, Draftail.
Thoughts on life after fffunction
Some thoughts on coming out of a seven year long stint as owner and technical director of UX agency fffunction.