We’ve built a launchpad that brings in projects from the WEB3 space and allows them to have their own cms collection connected with smart contracts and wallet integrations. All projects are built within the Webflow cms system.
We would like to use the membership beta to create accounts for all the projects and allow the users to sign in and have a dashboard with a form that’s assigned to their project cms item. From this form, users will be able to modify their assigned cms item, click submit and update the live site item.
I would really appreciate this if you guys have any suggestions on how to achieve this.
Attaching a screenshot of a brief concept map (might have missed airtable)
Gosh… that’s going to be really difficult with the Memberships beta, today.
The first issue is that the the CMS and Users are two isolated entities that have no built-in associations to each other.
The second issue is that there’s no mechanism provided to understand who the currently logged in user is.
To overcome the first issue you may be able to use Webflow Logic as they actually provide access to the unique User id. You could use that to create a Lookup Table in either Airtable or the Make (Integromat) Datastore - the latter being the better choice for this use-case.
To overcome the second issue you’d need to bolt on some custom Javascript and tap into their undocumented front-end API.
I’d say there is a strong likelihood that it’s doable, but it’s a heavy lift - today.
I’m sure as the Memberships feature leaves beta it will evolve into something that allows for this, a lot of folks are demanding the very same thing.
The benefit of using Webflow Memberships is that it truly gates your content on a backend server, versus 3rd party solutions which only “hide” your content on the webpage.
The benefit of using 3rd party solutions is they are more fully featured allowing you to do more of the things you’re asking for, but at the cost of securing your content.
Chris thank you so much for taking the time to write this. I’ve been looking at nocodequest.com for a while now, even before posting here on Webflow and I have to admit that what you do is huge and very helpful to a lot of folks in here.
No idea on where to start with the custom JS but I appreciate your input a lot.
Hi David, as Chris commented above there is no integrated support for User-gated CMS items yet. In fact, Webflow has not formally announced whether any form of User-level gating, or any form of CMS Item-level gating is on the roadmap for Memberships. You’d need both of these, combined… so I wouldn’t count on this becoming a real feature [ever] unless that announcement is made.
In my personal view, it’s unlikely that will happen anytime soon, for 3 reasons.
It requires some massive infrastructure and UI changes.
It’s not particularly useful… with a CMS item limit of 10,000 records, if you have 1,000 members at only 10 records each, you’re out of space.
It’s not what the CMS was actually built for. The CMS was designed primarily for managing public content, i.e. things published publicly on the site. Even today, you cannot exclude a collection from your auto-generated sitemap.xml, or delete its generated collection page.
Could that change? Sure. The best indication that Webflow might be headed in a more application-friendly direction is the work that the Logic team is doing. They are up to some awesome stuff… but it’s a long haul.
For what it’s worth, I have built a few internal sites that support Member-specific CMS-items. However the construction of these features requires a series of hacks and external automations, and comes with unacceptable security holes. With some creativity, it’s possible to get the current User’s ID, email, custom fields, and access groups, and to store/retrieve user-specific CMS items, however it’s just not a viable production solution. You can not build a legit site this way.
If you really want the ability to track members and to store member-specific data, you may be better off using a data store like AirTable, or perhaps your own custom database via Xano. For memberships, Memberstack has the ability to access a member ID, so you’ll have a key to store and retrieve that data with. The rest you’d need to build with automation.
…is part of a series that walks you through how to do exactly what you’ve asked for with Memberstack, instead.
I didn’t mention since Webflow Memberships seemed to be the preference, but if custom JS is a hurdle, this could be a way for you to get past it (in the near term) until Webflow Memberships can catch up.
happy to hear it’s been helpful.