Delivering a content management system at scale for a busy team working globally

The Department for International Trade (DIT) underwent huge changes in strategy after the vote to leave the EU.

Torchbox provides a content management system (CMS), Wagtail, to the department and DIT’s content management team and Torchbox work together to deliver a long-term development roadmap.

Wagtail needed to adapt fast to keep pace with the changing needs, while continuing to be usable and stable for the teams relying on it to publish important information for a global audience.

It was clear that the business-as-usual publishing would have to continue to be supported and be unaffected by any other work happening on Wagtail.

Publishing at DIT is complex, with a need for localisation, translation and input into content from a number of different teams. It also now needed to work on a major new content strategy that would align with the new political priorities.

To support the busy content team, we explored a number of short-term enhancements to simplify aspects of the content creation, review and publication experience. This included better support for custom moderation and approval workflows, audit trail functionality, and the ability to preview, review and comment on draft pages, without the need for access to Wagtail Admin.

Another outcome of complex publishing is that over time, needs and processes can evolve. We saw that DIT’s Wagtail setup was being used for 5 separate frontend services – we consolidated these into a single frontend, to simplify publishing for the content team, saving them time and effort. We saw how Wagtail was being used as a headless CMS, so we updated our support for developers and editors.

DIT needs world-class support for its international content and translation workflow, due to its large network of overseas posts who need to be able to promote content relevant to their own countries.

We built an internationalisation plugin in just a few days to support Google’s i18n and translation needs. This will be the new default approach to internationalisation in Wagtail, saving content editors time and increasing trust in the abo;oty of the platform to support its ever-evolving needs.

Keeping Wagtail accessible and legally compliant as standards change mean this is an area of active development for the Torchbox team. This focus also makes Wagtail one of only a very few open source content management platforms that actively ensures accessibility for content editors and creators.

The priority was for the content team to be able to keep publishing and keep on delivering. While the daily priorities changed and interest in the department grew, our focus was on supporting those content editors and publishers.

Some of our reflections:

• When political priorities are changing, staff need to be able to rely on their tools, including a content management system. Making changes during a period of pressure is risky – platform stability and predictability is crucial.
• Content teams are always up against time pressures, so saving them time is paramount.
• Localisation and translation needs are becoming more sophisticated. These areas are traditionally underserved in content management systems, so Wagtail’s development in these areas is welcomed.
• Accessibility is becoming more important for content delivery, and this will continue to develop as more research is done.
• Content operations is becoming more of a known need so having a CMS that can adapt and be configured in a number of ways – such as Wagtail can – helps teams with complex publishing needs.

Delivering improvements to Wagtail in the context of a large, distributed team during a period of intense pressure was a challenge. Our blended team were careful to understand the team’s needs, test features before releasing them and gave the Wagtail team many ideas for future improvements.