Wagtail 7.4 was released on 5 May 2026. One week later, Sparrow CMS 7.4.0 is out, pinned to the new line — same APIs, same admin, just tracking the upstream release.
What's in Wagtail 7.4
Wagtail 7.4 is a regular feature release. The headline change is internal — preview data now lives in a dedicated FormState model instead of being stuffed into the session, which removes a long-standing source of edge-case bugs around long-form previews and concurrent edits.
Django 4.2 support has been dropped. Wagtail 7.4 requires Django 5.1+. Sparrow is on Django 6.0 in production, so this is a no-op for us.
Full upstream changelog: docs.wagtail.org/releases/7.4.
What changes in Sparrow
Sparrow 7.4.0 mostly aligns the version label with the upstream line. The base image (ghcr.io/sparrow-cms/sparrow:7.4.0) pins wagtail==7.4.* in requirements/base.txt; setup.cfg and the release tuple in sparrow/__init__.py move to 7.4.0. Site images that follow the chain (sparrow-edu → site image) inherit the upgrade on their next rebuild.
No migrations from sparrow itself. No API changes. No template changes.
Python, Django, and what LTS buys you
The Sparrow base image runs on python:3.14-trixie. Python 3.14 was released in October 2025. Python itself doesn't formally use the LTS label — instead, every minor version gets roughly five years of support: two years of regular bugfixes, then three years of security-only patches. 3.10 is the oldest line still receiving security fixes; 3.14 is the current freshest. Sparrow tracks the latest minor because the base image rebuilds anyway when Python ships a new line, and there's no upside to lagging.
On the Django side, Sparrow currently runs on Django 6.0 (December 2025). Django ships a feature release roughly every eight months and an LTS every two years. The current LTS is Django 5.2 (April 2025), supported until April 2028. The older Django 4.2 LTS hits end-of-life in April 2026 — if you have a service still pinned there, the clock is running.
Wagtail follows a similar pattern: every fourth release is designated LTS. Wagtail 7.4 is a feature release, not LTS. The current LTS line is Wagtail 6.3, supported through mid-2026; the next LTS will be 8.0. Sparrow tracks the feature line because Wagtail's LTS releases lag the feature work by 6–12 months, and most customers want the new admin and StreamField improvements as they ship, not a year later.
What 'LTS' actually buys you, in practice: a longer no-forced-upgrade window. On a feature line you get a new release every ~6 months with a ~9-month security tail — so plan for roughly one upgrade per year. On an LTS line you get one release that's supported for 2–3 years, with only bugfixes landing on top. For an internal tool with ops bandwidth to upgrade quarterly, the feature line is fine and you stay current. For a customer-facing site where every dependency bump is a scheduled change with QA and signoff, LTS removes a noisy class of work — at the cost of being a few features behind. Sparrow can be pinned to either — your call.
Upgrading your site
If your site's Dockerfile uses SPARROW_BASE_VERSION=latest, the next rebuild picks up 7.4.0 automatically. If you pin a specific tag, bump it to 7.4.0 in your site's .env, run just publish-image, and roll the deployment.
Sites running 7.3.1.x already shipped wagtail 7.4 transitively in their latest builds — the version label is the change you'll see, not the runtime.