Wagtail’s Philly event reaches beyond its software, aiming to bring together Python enthusiasts

Like minded developers, content creators and others will be gathering in Philadelphia next week for the Wagtail Space conference at the University of Pennsylvania.

Wagtail is an open source content management system similar to WordPress, but based in the coding language Python. The three day conference from June 20 to 22 will discuss all things Wagtail, but it‘ll go off topic a bit too, catering toward a wider developer audience, organizer Tim Allen said. Philly’s central location to many East Coast cities makes it a good fit for the conference, he said.

“This is not your typical developer conference,” Allen told Technical.ly. “There’s a lot more than technology that gets discussed at these conferences. Mental health is on the board, there’s all kinds of different topics.”

This conference has already been hosted in Philadelphia twice in 2018 and 2019 at the Wharton School and is returning to Philly this year.  Torchbox, the UK-based digital agency behind Wagtail, also has offices in cities along the East Coast, so it’s easier for its team in Europe to attend if the conference’s in Philly.

This conference isn’t just for developers

The conference is three days long, two days of talks and one day for “sprints.” The talks are a mix of developer-focused topics and topics that are targeted toward editors and writers.

The last day will be an opportunity to work together on Wagtail and train newcomers on how to set up a site, navigate the system and make contributions.

The free conference is targeted towards anyone interested in content management, although the crowd is usually mostly developers. Organizers would love to see more people from the business and content creation side though, Meagen Voss, organizer and partnership and community manager at Torchbox, said. Attendees can also join virtually through Zoom.

Overall, the conference is an opportunity to feel connected to the Wagtail community and get inspiration from others, organizer Scott Cranfill told Technical.ly.

“We have a really great community that is super inclusive and that comes from the lineage of Python and Django communities that Wagtail builds off of,” Cranfill said. “It’s great to get together with all these people and learn from each other and support each other.”

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.