Apocalypse Again

When the church is the enemy of the church
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Read more about the work that has gone into making the website ready for signups, blogs, commenting and newsletters.
Standing at the entrance

By Wesley Penner on
July 22, 2026

After spending more than a month working on the site on my laptop I have it ready for use. The site is built using Wagtail which includes much of what I need for building and maintaining the site. Here is a list of the main site features:

  1. Pages: The main feature of Wagtail is creating pages. I have not yet published all the different pages yet, but as I get closer to publishing the book, I will have more content on the site about the book.
  2. A blog: The blog allows me to create content over time that is news and important to keep long term. Unlike pages, I will likely unpublish very few blog posts.
  3. Integration of the Django Allauth module into the site. This gives me a number of ways for site users to create their accounts. The primary way, using email to sign up, was the most important. I was able to also include Apple ID and Google account integrations as a convenient way to create an account. I was considering Facebook, but there were a few too many hoops to jump through (note: I had already gone through those hoops with Apple and Google for other reasons).
  4. Comments: I added a comment feature for signed in users to interact directly on Blog posts within the site. The comments are moderated.
  5. Wagtail Metadata adds social media controls to pages and blog content, giving me some more control on how images and content are displayed.
  6. I added Wagtail Newsletter and developed an integration with Mailjet so that I can publish Blog posts as newsletters. Site users subscribe to the newsletter by creating an account on the site and then checking the box for which newsletter they want to subscribe to:
    1. Every blog post: Signing up to this, a user will get notifications whenever a blog post is published.
    2. Quarterly: Every January, April, July and October I'll create a summary of the past quarter's blog posts for people that don't want to check in all the time but like having infrequent updates.
    3. Annual: Every December I'll provide a summary for the year and highlight a handful of blog posts from the past year.

For those who like to know the details of what the site is running on, the site is hosted at DigitalOcean with a hosted Postgres database. I run the site behind Cloudflare. These services have proven themselves user friendly and reliable.

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