CMS Collection Field Can't be deleted

Though learning a bit every day I still classify myself as a webflow noobie. I’m hoping a more experienced flow-er (not to be confused with flower) can help.

The web site I’m creating takes advantage of WF’s CMS collections. One of those collections (Projects) utilizes collection fields with one of them being redundant. (Initially I used a drop-down menu and incorporated it into a page and then subsequently changed it to a plain text field. Now I can’t delete references to the dropdown menu. I get an error message that it’s “currently used by either a Collection List of the site or inside a Collection Page. To delete this field, you’ll need to remove any references to it first”

The item that is needing to be removed resides within a CMS Collections titled, “Projects” within it there are 8 items… each of which have a text field titled “Style2” and a dropdown menu titled “Style” I want to delete “Style”


It can be tedious to delete all bindings prior to delete a field or a collection. I’m working on a checklist/method, here is the draft of it. If this doesn’t work, then contact support@webflow.com, but please try all the following before:


Before being able to delete a collection, delete all bindings of purple elements in the Designer
– in the viewport: template page elements, and Collection Lists elements in static pages: all link settings must be turned to none
– in the Settings tab: elements can be bound to the Collection by a background image, a background color, a text color or a border color

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– in the Page settings: SEO, OG and RSS can be bound to the Collection fields

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– inside of every block of custom code (inside of a Collection List on static pages, or anywhere in a Template page)

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– How to browse all elements in the Navigator to spot purple ones? In the Navigator tab, select the Body element, keep Alt pressed while you press Arrow Down as many times as needed to browse all element. This will unfold the complete tree view of your site.

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– pay attention to the error message, they sometimes contain clues to where a binding is conflicting
– if you ever run into a case where you think all the bindings are deleted, but they are not, try to do a full version save of the site, by pressing cmd+shift+s in Mac or ctrl-shift-s in Windows. If that does not allow you to delete the collection element(s) then send an email to support@webflow.com.

I am also looking for the same

Just by reading the looooong checklist I’m baffled as how nobody at Webflow ever looked into this and found a user friendly solution. This is NOT COOL at all and I can’t believe that’s the way to go :smiley:

Insert a second confirmation dialog and then break these reference links Webflow!!!

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