Using Draftail outside of a Wagtail Admin page is a nightmare about draftail

[zerolab]

Hey @boatcoder, have you seen https://github.com/timonweb/non-admin-draftail? Maybe that can help a bit?

[kiwiheretic]

@zerolab 's solution only works for a website which is using Wagtail forms but what if the form is manually crafted from HTML? Or is this project incompatible with such an approach?

[boatcoder]

That seems like a huge step in the right direction

[krystianmagdziarz]

Hi, any update?

[thibaudcolas]

Hi, I’m going to close this now.

I’m not sure how clear this is to anyone in this thread but Draftail is a standalone editor that’s used in lots of projects that aren’t Wagtail. I think the documentation is clear on what steps are needed to use it on a given project. The editor implementation in this repository springload/draftail will never contain any Wagtail-specific code.

This issue is about Wagtail’s setup of Draftail not being usable outside the Wagtail CMS admin interface – and that’s all due to how the editor is set up specifically inside the CMS,

• Wagtail uses custom styles for the editor, not the vanilla styles of the standalone editor
• Icons are a pain to load because Wagtail has a very specific way of setting up its icons
• Commenting is a Wagtail feature that happens to be heavily tied to the editor within the CMS
• All the other global variables mentioned above are specific to Wagtail

In addition Wagtail’s link chooser, document chooser, etc – are all specific to the CMS and would also be a pain to get working outside of the CMS admin interface.

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If anyone wants to take this forward – I think being able to use some of Wagtail’s UI outside the admin UI would make for a great feature request on the Wagtail repository. I’d recommend being specific about the current issues (icons, comments, etc), and keeping it professional (avoid things like "I've had to do some things that make me cringe").

As far as the approach, the most likely way to make this work in my opinion would be to have a <wagtail-draftail></wagtail-draftail> Web Component in the CMS, which packages up the admin styles and necessary icons.