Hi, I’m new here. I haven’t yet used Webflow. I have an idea. Ordinarily, I would go to my typical tool, WordPress, but I am looking for a no-/low-code way to build it. Can Webflow manage it?
I think it calls for front-end forms for creating and editing content, plus some particular relationships/permissions of users to groups.
A platform where executives post viewpoint articles in response to news stories, building in to a commentary repository and feed for each executive and each of their companies .
A viewpoint post should contain a headline , body and possibly tags , plus a URL for the story it is a reaction to and a summary of what happened, in our executive 's words…
This should show on an article page. A call-out should make clear the original story that this viewpoint is a reaction to, if we can extract those details using an external service…
Each executive would have a public profile , showing a list of their viewpoint/reaction articles, a count of them, and information about the company they belong to.
Each of those companies should have a public profile , aggregating viewpoint posts from all its executives and listing all of its people , plus showing company info like description and links to social or websites.
Here’s the thing about the user/data model… First, executives should belong to companies . Second, executives won’t necessarily be posting directly - posting should normally be carried out on their behalf by users (let’s call them helpers ) beloning to another class of company (let’s call them providers ). Third, companies should relate up to provider s, so that each provider is responsible for posting for a basket of companies . Fourth, each provider may have multiple helpers doing that posting.
I have an idea for how I might build this in my go-to tool over the years, WordPress, but it would certainly involve code. I’m interested in how I could put this together in something lighter-weight from the no-code space in 2020 - maybe for prototype but, if there is something that can support a more real-world outcome, great.
I’m pretty sure the tools you’re looking for is Memberstack.io, in combination with Zapier, which both work together with Webflow to create an account management-styled site that you’ve described. Combined with Webflow’s advanced CMS, I’d say what you’re describing is absolutely possible!
Do keep in mind, when you need that much services combined to achieve a data flow it might be a better solution to code it or have it coded. If you count up the monthly subscriptions to each of these, you’re looking at maybe hundreds of dollars per month.
Personally I would build the frontend in webflow, export it from here, git init it and turn it into a react or php application that either talks to a backend or is completely server side.
Imagine this costing 150 USD per month to run; that’s 900 USD by the time of month 6.
You could probably stitch together Webflow plus some other platforms.
In my experience Webflow is top notch for those who want flexibility, creativity and freedom in design. For example a restaurant, or a business where the data is mainly static, and the things you need to CMS to do are relatively straightforward like bios or news articles.
For a complex, content-driven site, where you have a database, relationships, etc., Webflow lacks features. I think they’ve focused more on the design sophistication, and more recently the online store functionality. Regardless there is no user-level login/password system. You could check out Bubble.io to see if it has what you need.
@Ed3 - Indeed. Ultimately, if the project is worth creating it will need a user system with a particular set of relationships and permissions between different classes of company Those I could imagine pulling the content to Webflow, I could only think about exploring Memberspace+Webflow for the user piece.
Anyway, what I realised is, the idea calls for a rough test / prototype before diving in, and that doesn’t need a user system out of the gate. I could just pipe some content to indicative profile pages.
Good luck. I did some research a while back on user sign-in systems, and all the ones I found simply acted as a doorman by requiring a login to see the page built within webflow. (Also they were not foolproof since someone with the expertise could bypass it). I didn’t find any solutions that actually connected the user to webflow’s CMS (webflow’s term for the database functionality) so that you could, for example, have a user with a list of favorite items, have users access some data but not others, or give users permission to submit specific items that are tied to their user ID.
Webflow’s CMS had some nice functionality in terms of its relationships, but it’s not fully functional in terms of all the things offered by other platforms. For one of my projects that is very data intensive and required full freedom in terms of how data is searched and displayed, I ran into some major issues that ultimately required me to evaluate other solutions.
