Inside Wagtail's News Template - What Works, What's Broken, and What's Missing

I spent several weeks reading the wagtail/news-template codebase for my Google Summer of Code application. This post shares what I found - what works, what is broken, and what could be better. The wagtail/news-template homepage - dark mode enabled by default What the starter kit is The news-template is a Wagtail starter kit for news and media websites. It gives you article pages, topic filtering, pagination, search, and dark mode. Everything works out of the box. The design uses Tailwind CSS and is responsive. What it does well The content model is solid. ArticlePage supports authors, topics, publication dates, and hero images. The body is built from StreamField blocks. Editors can add sections, quotes, stats, and cards - no code needed. The block system is flexible. FeaturedArticleBlock lets editors override an article's image, description, and CTA text. Topic filtering works via query parameters. It is a small but thoughtful detail. What is broken or missing Reading the code revealed