Hey, Webflowers!
I’m a seasoned Webflow dev, but still don’t understand why Webflow doesn’t allow our clients to edit components globally in Build mode? Am I missing something?
I understand that Build mode is for, well, building pages and so on, mostly per-page building. However, there are cases, and quite many of them, when clients would love to update master components throughout their sites. Imagine an advertisement banner that appears on every page. It has no properties, because it should be just a component with the same design site-wide. It is impossible (I hope I’m wrong) for our clients to work on cases like that in Build mode.
Basically, there are a few issues with components in Build mode:
- Clients can only edit components via properties, i.e. editing a component’s instance, not the component itself.
So it is impossible for clients to, say, change the aforementioned ad banner across the site. They need to use Design mode to do so.
- Clients cannot add components inside component slots.
Honestly speaking, I didn’t know that it was an issue even. I was building a solution for my client, and it worked in Design mode, but I found out that it was not the case during Google Meet call when I presented it to the client. Now I do an extra additional Build mode testing to ensure everything works as intended.
As an example:
You create a site for selling sparkling water with different flavors. You have different thematic pages (travel, work, gaming, etc) which are quite similar in structure, but design is a tad bit different, hence you make a products section and convert it to a component, so it can be reused on said pages. Then you proceed to add Slots to the component expecting your client filling out these Slots with product cards (another component), so it’ll be a breeze for them to add unique sparkling water for every thematic page.
The thing is, you can’t. Why? Clients cannot add Components into Slots if said Slots are inside another Component in Build mode. No idea behind this reasoning.
Apologies for quite an extensive post, but I hope the community can shed a light on the reasoning behind these limitations.