I’ve been using Webflow for a little over a year, and overall I think it’s a solid platform.
But I honestly can’t understand why something as basic as accessing existing assets when working with CMS items is still such a pain.
For example: I can upload an image asset for an article, compress it in Webflow, all good.
But if I then want to assign that same image to a CMS item — nope. I’m forced to upload the file again from my computer. Same thing happens in the Rich Text Editor.
So now I’ve got duplicate files for no real reason, even though the asset already exists and is optimized.
It feels like a very basic workflow issue that should be easy to fix. Maybe it’s time to pump the brakes a bit on all the AI features and focus on nailing these core CMS/asset workflows instead.
I’ve wished for this sometimes as well and maybe the NextGen CMS platform will allow that- it’s a big shift to a more robust CMS architecture.
But to answer your question “why,” I think historically the juice wasn’t worth the squeeze. It adds significant complications, eg. if you delete an image from assets, Webflow has to check up to a million CMS records on some Enterprise accounts to determine what fields need cleared that were linking to that asset.
If that CMS image field is a required field, that complicates things further, because the asset deletion has to then be blocked until you find and unlink those CMS items. That adds up to a lot of extra code, user interfaces to help you find things, etc, all of which adds significant performance challenges.
In my case I’ve found that just maintaining a folder of common assets for each client has made it easy for them, and that the situation is pretty rare in most sites. More commonly each Staff photo or each Blog post would have unique photos anyway that don’t exist in assets.