CMS best practices: what's the best way to uploading a CSV and then updating it again?

Hi everyone,

I’m a little new to CMS so bear with me…

I’m wondering if uploading a new CSV is supposed to replace the old content.

When I upload a CSV file, then change some data in the spreadsheet (which is being shared and edited by a team of people), and upload it again I end up with duplicate entries. I have to delete all the old entries to get this to work. It doesn’t recognize that the table headers are the same and simply duplicates every cms item.

Is this a normal function? Should people be editing and styling CMS content within Webflow after the initial upload? What happens when a CSV sheet of about 100 items needs another 400 added that are in the same format from the same sheet?

Thanks for any tips!

It is how it currently functions.

If they are not using the API and external tools to manage records then yes. The CSV import is to get the ball rolling. Not a sync tool.

Only upload the 400 new items.

There are some new integrations between Airtable (example) and Webflow where you can manage all of the CMS items from Airtable and avoid these issues. Finsweet released an extension in Airtable and PowerImporter has one.

1 Like

Hey Jeff,

I appreciate your help!

Thank you for the clarification and the Airtable suggestion. I’ll give it a shot.

PowerImporter offers a workflow to update CMS items with a CSV upload.

It does exactly what you are trying to do. Simply upload the CSV, map the columns to the fields you want to update, and it will update the CMS items if they already exist.

1 Like

Awesome. Thank you Marc! I’ll relay this to my team.