Good ID

This year, as well as working on Job Garden my professional work has involved making the Good ID website.

Good ID is a site about how digital identity systems should work well, and is made with the fine folk at Unfold Stories, who are responsible for the design and content and… well, everything except the code.

The site’s built with Django which is my preferred tool for sites that have very specific requirements. In planning how to approach the site I decided to give the Wagtail CMS a go — I’d heard good things about it and it sounded like it would suit the project well. Thankfully those good things proved correct and it was a great fit.

Wagtail is built on top of Django and makes for a faster way to get a content-oriented website up and running, with a much nicer admin front-end than the useful-but-utilitarian Django Admin. While some CMSes are set-up and configured entirely, or partially, through their friendly admin screens, all the initial set-up of a Wagtail site is done in code which I love; everything is in Git (or whatever) and — aside from the frequently-tweaked admin-facing settings — there’s less manual copying around of configuration from dev site to staging site to live site than I’ve experienced with other CMSes. Also, it works happily with any other Django code your project needs.

Not only was Wagtail itself a boon but it has a great community behind it. There are lots of add-ons and tutorials and articles about it, questions on Stack Overflow get answered, and the Wagtail Slack is invaluable. There the folks at Torchbox, who created Wagtail, are helpful and patient beyond the call of duty, which makes getting to grips with this new tool, or figuring out your special problems, so much easier. All in all, thumbs up for Wagtail and everyone involved in it.

As ever, email me if you have something that needs making on the web, whether it’s Wagtail-shaped or not.