Unfortunately the Webflow CMS and Collection list designs do not support hierarchies well. You can describe blog articles and categories well, but when you try to add sub-categories, you will hit some serious design limitations.
The usual way around this involves a lot of custom code, some duplicate fields in the CMS, and learning ninja-level skills on tools like Finsweet CMS Nets. That’s very expensive in time, and the end result is complex, fragile, difficult to admin, and often slow.
I happen to be working on some ideas to overcome this but it requires a reverse proxy and some special data pages. It won’t be ready for some time even if I find a solution I really like.
What I’d recommend instead is that you bend your project to Webflow’s limitations. One good approach is;
Keep categories
Blogs reference categories directly ( single ref )
Eliminate sub-categories and replace them with “tags”
Have your blogs multi-ref the tags
This gives you a few vectors of organization and navigation, but keeps a main topical structure in place as well.
Again, not perfect, but it can work.
Generally I avoid using Webflow’s nested lists and multi-refs, they’re both quite difficult to work with, however they work well for tags especially if you will generally be under 5 items for most blog entries.
