Tech Blog

Here I'll be sharing insights from my professional experiences and studies in data science and web development. There'll be plenty of Wagtail, Django and Python, a bit of JavaScript and CSS thrown in, and more on data science & engineering. There might even be a bit of time for some project management and business analysis too.

I'll also provide insights into how this site was made, as well as code examples and thoughts on how those could be further developed.

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Dealing with UNIQUE Fields on a Multi-lingual Site

In Django and Wagtail, for many translation models, a copy of the page tree is made for each language rather than inserting the translated text directly into the template or model.

This poses a problem for models that have fields with UNIQUE constraints as attempting to save a copy of the default language instance will trigger an integrity error (ie duplicate key).

Fortunately, if you're using the TranslatableMixin, there's a way around this.

Configure Wagtail robots.txt and Block Search Indexing

Rather than just being a static file, you can use Django/Wagtail templating to create a dynamically generated robots.txt. This is not the place to block search engine crawlers though, I'll show a method to apply that from your base template.

Open Wagtail Rich Text Block Links in a New Tab

You'd think this would be something you could do out of the box, but the makers of Wagtail have stated that this is against their philosophy and won't ever be implementing it. Here's a simple fix to circumvent that decision.

Wagtail Introduction

Wagtail is a leading open source CMS utilising Python and the Django framework. Tens of thousands of organisations worldwide, including Google, Mozilla, NASA, and the British NHS are now using Wagtail. In case you're new to Wagtail, and looking to learn as a developer, I've gathered some great learning resources here to get you started.