Wagtail's development has always been a community effort, and this new version shows it more than ever. The most visible change this time is the introduction of a new welcome page when starting a new project - work on this feature was started by Tim Allen at Wagtail Space US in Philadelphia, continued by Scott Cranfill at DjangoCon US, and completed at Wagtail Space Minsk by Thibaud Colas.

Plenty of other pieces of work from October's sprint in Minsk have made it into this release, and it's been especially exciting to see older pull requests being dusted off and seen through to completion. The new 'image_url' template tag, originally developed by Yannick Chabbert and completed in Minsk by Dan Braghis, provides a neat solution to performance issues on image-heavy pages, by shifting the image processing to happen on each image's own HTTP request.

Working with images within the admin has also been improved, with a redesigned image editing view courtesy of Janneke Janssen and Ben Enright, and image and document choosers that now show collection names. We've also made some important steps in making the editing workflow more customisable, with new hooks for actions on moving pages and modifying the action menu on the page editor, paving the way for add-ons such as the newly-released wagtail-review extension.

This is only a small selection of the improvements and fixes in this release - for the full list, see the 2.4 release notes. Work on 2.5 is now well under way - if you like what we're doing, why not bless us with a Christmas star on GitHub!