Anyway

I coded XML.com in Wagtail, a CMS based on Django. It works well for my needs and I like Python as a programming language. One of the big reasons I like Wagtail is that it includes a powerful enough but not overly complicated workflow with roles and a built-in moderation and preview system.

But, I wanted a system where people could submit news items that would go into the moderation queue without needing to sign up for a login first. Fortunately, Wagtail makes that possible, and there’s a nice article by Erin Mullaney at Wagtail: 2 Steps for Adding Pages Outside of the CMS that details all the steps you need. It all worked nicely in more recent versions of Wagtail (thanks, Erin!) except for one part, the notification that the news item is in the moderation queue. That wasn’t a stop-ship item, so XML.com launched without those emails working.

I’ve now found the source of the problem. It turns out that when you submit a news item in this way, it doesn’t have a login identity attached to it (obviously, since there isn’t one). The send_notification function that sends the email uses templates, and these templates use the login identity of the author in the body of the email. Since that doesn’t exist, the whole function fails.

That means the solution is easy. The affected templates are wagtailadmin/notifications/submitted.txt and wagtailadmin/notifications/submitted.html, and Wagtail lets you customize the admin templates. I put my customized admin templates into a utils application, which contains all my utilities for the site. My utils/templates/wagtailadmin/notifications/submitted.txt file now has the content

{% extends 'wagtailadmin/notifications/submitted.txt' %}
{% load i18n %}

{% block content %}
{% blocktrans with page=revision.page|safe %}The page "{{ page }}" has been submitted for moderation.{% endblocktrans %}

{% trans "You can preview the page here:" %} {{ settings.BASE_URL }}{% url 'wagtailadmin_pages:preview_for_moderation' revision.id %}
{% trans "You can edit the page here:" %} {{ settings.BASE_URL }}{% url 'wagtailadmin_pages:edit' revision.page.id %}
{% endblock %}

Similar changes are necessary for the wagtailadmin/notifications/submitted.html file if you want to send HTML emails instead.