My First Steps into Open Source: Setting Up Wagtail for GSoC 2026

As a first-year BTech student, I always thought open source contribution was something only experienced developers did. GSoC 2026 proved me wrong. Why GSoC? When I first heard about Google Summer of Code, I was intimidated. But then I saw Wagtail — a Django-based CMS with a friendly community and a history of mentoring newcomers. Six years, fourteen successful projects. That felt like a sign. Picking Wagtail I looked at a few organizations. Some required deep math knowledge, others needed years of experience. Wagtail was different — their contributor guide was clear, their Slack was welcoming, and their project ideas made sense to me even as a beginner. The Demo Website Redesign project caught my eye immediately. The Setup I started with the basics — forking the repository on GitHub and cloning it locally. Sounds simple, but for someone who had only used Git for personal projects, working with an upstream remote was new territory. The first real lesson came with virtual environments. I