Practical writing on Python, Django, Wagtail and the craft of building web software — increasingly with an AI bent. No fluff. Just things we've actually shipped.
The exact blueprint we use to move sites off WordPress — the content audit, an automated WXR import pipeline, mapping posts into typed StreamField blocks, media, 301 redirects, SEO continuity, and a realistic look at timeline and budget.
Wagtail was born in the British public sector. For teams facing another expensive Drupal upgrade — nodes vs pages, JSON:API data export, GDS & WCAG 2.2 compliance, G-Cloud procurement.
Why rich text fails at scale, how StreamFields work, building custom blocks with full code, and the editorial workflow patterns that make Wagtail's admin a pleasure.
FCA, GDPR, PSD2 and Cyber Essentials all want the same boring controls — opinionated security, append-only audit trails, a real admin, and migrations as code.
Six weeks of engineering. £63k/yr recurring saving. p95 latency cut 80%. The bottleneck, the profiling methodology, and the six ORM fixes that mattered.
Hygraph is the GraphQL-native, content-federation pitch in the headless market. An honest comparison — content modelling, federation, pricing, editorial UX, i18n.
From sync, slow and scary to deploy — to async-first, modular, and modern. Django 3→5 migration path, async DRF patterns, untangling circular imports.
Contentful is the default headless CMS recommendation in a lot of circles. An honest comparison — content modelling, pricing, editorial UX, and who each one is right for.
Three mature Python CMS platforms, three very different philosophies. Content modelling, editorial UX, headless capability — and an honest recommendation for each use case.
Built-in features, metadata models, sitemaps, Core Web Vitals and structured data — the full Wagtail SEO playbook for SEO specialists, marketers and developers.
Modular monolith vs microservices, multi-tier caching, Celery, Postgres tier scaling, and async stateless workers — the patterns that carry Python sites at scale.
After a decade of building with both, our unvarnished comparison — content modelling, security, editorial UX, and where each platform genuinely excels.
A practical walkthrough: Wagtail API setup, page serialization, image renditions, preview mode, and ISR — with real code you can copy.
From N+1 queries to Redis caching and Celery offloading — the specific patterns we apply to every Django app before it ships.
A CIO-grade comparison: security CVEs, customisation, Python-vs-PHP developer experience, and 5-year Total Cost of Ownership.
StructBlock nesting, custom chooser blocks, block-level validation, and the StreamField patterns that separate beginner Wagtail builds from production ones.
Factory Boy over fixtures, pytest over unittest, transaction isolation, and how we write tests that catch real bugs rather than just satisfying coverage thresholds.
Snippet choosers, bulk publish, scheduled publishing, comparison views, and all the Wagtail editor features that most builds never surface. Your editorial team will thank you.
Forget the parrot metaphors. An LLM is a function — text in, text out. Tokens, temperature, context windows, hallucinations, tool use — with a working 30-line Python app.
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