CMS Best Practices - Blogs & Categories

Design help CMS
1

Hi everyone,

I’m completely new to Webflow. I’m working with a designer to build a site for my new company. One of the things I would like to understand is some best practices around blogs and their relationship to collection lists.

Here’s what I am trying to accomplish. My resource center will have a variety of content over time. I want visitors to know if a particular piece of content is a blog, white paper, webinar, etc. Let’s call this the Resource Type “attribute” (probably a reserved term in webflow but I’m using it generically) As well, I would like to have the visitor know if it is related to technology A, technology B, and so on. Let’s call this the Technology Type attribute

So my question is, would you recommend

  1. Creating 2 collections (Resource Type, Technology Type) OR
  2. Create 1 collection and put both “attributes” in the collection

I’d love a little insight into your recommendation if you share one so I can start to better connect the dots and understand the CMS capabilities better.

The goal is to implement a filter that allows a visitor to select from a single or both “attributes”. Bear in mind, I may add additional attributes over time as more CMS content is generated. As an example, I can foresee adding an Industry attribute or a category similar to how the forum here is organized (ex: Design Help)

I don’t have designer access right now as my designer is working on the site so I can’t share a link but if anything needs to be expanded on or clarified, let me know.

Thanks so much in advance for your insight!

2

Without knowing more, I’d do it this way;

  • Technology collection contains tech details
  • Content Type collection contains your content types
  • Blog collection contains your blogs
    • Single-ref to Content Type
    • Multi-ref to Technology

This gives you a lot of flexibility, including the ability to build a filter page later that that a user can choose content types, technologies and date ranges and see your available content.

Content Type does not strictly need to be a collection, it could just be an option field within Blog. However I often find making it a full collection cleaner;

  • I can add attributes like a color or an icon field for more presentation options
  • I can have a Content-type-specific page, e.g. show all blogs
3

Thank you Michael, that’s exactly the insight I needed. I didn’t want to go down the path of multiple collections without someone validating that approach. It made logical sense to me but being new to the platform, I like to get the perspective of experts. Appreciate you sharing!

4

In short, Webflow’s CMS has RDBMS-like qualities so you’ll be able to trust your intuition to a limited extent, and model accordingly.

There are a few big limitations though;

  • Max 5 refs per collection ( CMS plan, 10 for business plan )
  • Refs are one-way, you don’t get a back-ref
  • No querying like SQL, you can’t create views
  • CMS Template pages are hard-bound to collections 1:1, so you cannot create two different versions ( e.g. public v. members-only ) for a CMS template page.

There are a lot of other details as well.

Main thing is that particularly as you’re learning it, prototype it. Just open a new blank project, slap in a few collections, see if you can model the data the way you want. Then build out the pages and navigation later.

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