Picata

This project is very much pre-alpha

Picata is a CMS & blog application I forked off from my personal website. At the moment it's effectively a ton of pre-made Wagtail "stuff" (models, views, templatetags, middleware, hooks, etc.), made generic enough that you can pip install the package, add it to your INSTALLED_APPS, and have a CMS/blog up-and-running without having to spend weeks or months tailoring Wagtail to your needs.

It's still under heavy development, with most documentation and a project template pending but - if you're already working with Wagtail - the source provides many working solutions to common problems. The repo for the aforementioned personal website lives on GitHub, and demonstrates a working implementation of this package (requiring, in fact, only this package as a dependency).

What's in the box?

• Wagtail (on Django) as the CMS & web frameworks
• Runs on PostgreSQL; loaded with scripts for managing the database lifecycle and snapshots
• Tailwind CSS in Sass for front-end styling
• lxml is used for fast HTML processing in a middleware layer

Development features & workflows

Everything's written in very modern Python (circa 2025), with agressive linting and type-checking thanks to mypy, Pydantic/Pyright, and Ruff. Picata uses Django Debug Toolbar, runserver_plus, and iPython for development workflows. The project itself uses pre-commit extensively, with 16 hooks to keep everything neat and tidy.

All front-end code is written in TypeScript, with React set up and ready-to-go in the Webpack pipeline, if you're into that kind of thing.

Holding things together

• Uses UV and pyproject.toml exclusively for Python project management
• Just as a task runner, with over 60 recipes (at last count)
• OpenTofu (a fork of Terraform) and cloud-init for all DevOps & rapid deployment
• Docker and Docker Compose for local development