CMS collections and URL structure

Design help CMS
1

Is there an easier way for us to set up a CMS collection structure than what I am running into? My brain is not working after staring at this for an hour lol

We’re a travel company and have a bunch of destinations that we want to show content for eg URL structure would ideally be

x y z .com/go/partner-name/guides
x y z .com/go/partner-name/reviews

or practically like

x y z .com/go/disney-cruise-line/guides
x y z .com/go/royal-caribbean-cruise-line/reviews

The prob I am running into is nesting them this way doesn’t seem possible without adding another parameter for the parent folder (which I set to destinations) and btw /go is the slug for the partner-name collection… so then it ends up reading:

x y z .com/go/destinations/disney-cruise-line/guides
x y z .com/go/destinations/royal-caribbean-cruise-line/reviews

Is there something super obvious I am missing with this or using nested collections somehow? We have 75+ travel partners and 1000+ guides/reviews so it’s gotta be scalable whatever route we go. Totally open to any suggestions!

2

Hi Ben,

I can feel your confusion :laughing:

In Webflow a collection page is tightly bound to a collection in a 1:1 fashion, so there is no support for e.g. your /guides and /reviews subpages.

Two ways you could do that;

SINGLE PAGE, TWO VIEWS

Use #guides and #reviews instead, or e.g. ?view=guides and then use Javascript to detect the hash/query and hide show the content DIVs accordingly. It would still be one page, but two “views” of that page.

SEO and canonicals are a bit of an issue here, but Google does run JS, so it should see these as two separate pages ( or more, if you need ).

REVERSE PROXY

Same underlying designer setup- one collection page where you’ve tagged sections with e.g. custom attributes view = guides but here the reverse proxy knows the path structure to expect and composes an actual page from your collection page source.

This is a much heavier lift programmatically, and introduces new infrastructure, so you need to know what you’re doing. However it means the canonicals, localization, etc. can all be handled properly.

Note these paths won’t be known to Webflow which means all of your links to these pages have to be manually formed or redirected. Also the sitemap won’t have these page variants, so ideally you’d handle that as well in the reverse proxy setup.

RECOMMENDATION

I build these types of proxies all the time for clients, because sometimes they’re critical to the client’s needs.

However my recommendation is to stay within the platform restrictions if you can, and only resort to a reverse proxy if you MUST. Reason being, it’s added complexity, and added infrastructure.

In your case, if you can use one collection page but with a big tabstrip at the top, it keeps things in line with current platform capabilities. Then you can add e.g. #guides and have some JS auto-select the correct tab for inbound linking convenience.

3

Thanks for the help brother! We have another site using webflow (vacationlab .io) and it’s crushing it. Was hoping to do the same for our re-design of famvia .com but don’t think it will work, definitely need ability to set real paths so like famvia .com/go/disney-world/guides/planning-a-trip etc

4

Webflow won’t let you nest CMS slugs the way you want, so you’ll either need a single collection page with tabs/filters for guides vs. reviews, or set up a reverse proxy if clean URLs are critical. Had to go the proxy route once for a client with 1000+ pages, but tabs are way simpler to maintain inside Webflow.

5

Unfortunately, custom paths aren’t available in the platform directly, but here are some details on the Fluid Paths solution I build when clients need it. It’s reverse-proxy based.

Webflow Fluid Paths | Sygnal