CMS : Best Practices for content management

[zappa (Ian)]

Hi. I am working on my first Webflow sites, and I have a few questions.

Collections and URLs
As I have posted about elsewhere, we need to give our clients a lot of flexibility to create and manage their content on the site. In order to do that, I was planning to use the CMS to create a few different page types that the client could choose from. General purpose pages that are used everywhere on the site would live in the same Collection. Using a reference field would allow the client to manage what section the page appeared in on the site.

However, I quickly realized that this solution is not ideal. It appears that a collection needs to have a name, and that name needs to appear in the URL. Thus, these pages would have a URL like:

Websitename.com/pages/meet-the-team
Websitename.com/pages/donate-now

The URL should semantic reflect the structure of the content for SEO purposes, more like this:

Websitename.com/**about-us**/meet-the-team
Websitename.com/**how-you-can-help/**donate-now/

Is it possible to change the structure of the URL so that the CMS pages so that we can have control over this using reference fields, or something else? Can anyone provide some guidance on best practices around how to manage this sort of content?

Static pages
How does a client create a new static page? Is it not possible to do?

Thank you!

[webdev (Jeff Selser)]

@zappa

Is it possible to change the structure of the URL so that the CMS pages so that we can have control over this using reference fields, or something else? Can anyone provide some guidance on best practices around how to manage this sort of content?

Not possible unless you created a collection for each. It’s a limitation of the platform. When it is a requirement I use something else.

@zappa

How does a client create a new static page? Is it not possible to do?

By using the designer. You can’t create static pages in the editor.

[zappa (Ian)]

OK, thank you. Yes, that is a little limiting. Having to create a collection for each section would mean a tremendous duplication of work. Setting up identical schemas for each section, styling the collection page to match — and then keeping them all up to date. That’s not really sustainable, I suspect.

I’m not really clear on what the best practices are for building a dynamic site for a client. Exposing the Designer view to the client is not really an option, I don’t think, as the design would be quickly broken. It seems as though the CMS is a great way to allow clients to create and manage their content, but I’m struggling with this URL issue.