Starter kit relaunch

[thibaudcolas]

Overhaul of the wagtail start support for custom templates and the news template for higher usability and maintainability.

Intended outcome

• Simpler support for multiple starter kits
• Tooling to guarantee starter kits are always up-to-date with latest releases
• Higher usability for developers creating new Wagtail projects
• Better maintainability of official starter templates

More information

• Building a Wagtail starter template
• Wagtail news template
• start command DX improvements #14350

[Scotchester]

I don't remember seeing this issue before! I think it makes sense on the roadmap for August, given the GSOC project in progress.

That project seems like it will address the last three bullets, at the very least for users of news-template specifically, but I am not sure what "Simpler support for multiple starter kits" means. Could you elaborate?

[lasse-cs]

I think this seems like a good issue, I'd also be interested if there are specific pain points that can be addressed as part of this.

I've found it surprising in the past when trying to write a custom template what will be touched by the wagtail start command and what wont:

https://github.com/wagtail/wagtail/blob/e1412d60adb549b0a3f1b290acf7fb3354abb957/wagtail/bin/wagtail.py#L106-L114

For "multiple starter kits" is the idea here to have something interactive where you choose the starter template you want from a list (I think kind of like npm create vite?)

[thibaudcolas]

Here are more concrete proposed improvements: start command DX improvements. For multiple templates specifically, we could have an official list of templates that would be available with a single "name" argument for them rather than URLs. Or encourage publishing of templates to PyPI with a predefined prefix, so there is no need to maintain a single list.