CMS panel plain text field glitch

Design help CMS
1

Hi,

I’ve started using just plain text fields more because of how I’m automating and have discovered what I can only imagine is an actual bug.

Half of my plain text fields keep their line breaks and the other half don’t. I’ve been through the help articles on the different line break style options. This is different and working unpredictably.

This is on the back end — on the actual CMS form.

I did a test. On the front end — in Designer — if I connect a plain text element (one with proper line break style options that is working) to a CMS plain text form field that does line break on the form, then it displays fine when I publish.

If I then connect the same front end Designer plain text element to one of the back end CMS form plain text fields where the line breaks do not work (they literally disappear after I add them), then it does not display properly when I publish or in Designer.

I even have plain text fields on the back end CMS where half the line breaks hold and the other half do not.

I tried shift-return and ctrl-return. I tried copy and paste from various sources. I tried removing the plain text field from CMS and adding a new one, such a hassle, but nope. It is just random as far as I have access to tell.

Why would one CMS form plain text field hold line breaks and another not. Or why would one hold only half the line breaks in the same field? Even if I try to fix the few that don’t work?

This must be a glitch, right? I mean, plain text doesn’t not have line breaks… There is something wrong with the CMS form field.

I have 13 weekly blogs and trying to launch and this is just holding up everything. Even if I wasn’t publishing using API, using the Rich Text elements are the most frustrating — and there’s that gap above and below that you can’t get rid of on them for whatever reason. They’re just plain limiting and alway seem to be the problematic elements before I automated.

How can a database like Notion have every text field hold rich text elements (everything except headers) but the Collection CMS of Webflow, which is just another database, doesn’t even have a normally functioning plain text field??

Help? Please help me scale as rapidly as I could if this simple function worked consistently, ideally normally.

This is the most concerning of the pages with issues, but they all are just completely random as to which they do. I just need a new line. Or like 500+ fields on one CMS entry?? Lol. The page is dynamic and conditional based on the day of the week an date so you kind of have to scan to find one sometimes. So I’ll post screen shots too that include the back end, where the bug must be living.

https://preview.webflow.com/preview/august-style?utm_medium=preview_link&utm_source=designer&utm_content=august-style&preview=81c3cf8cda4b9ed23539f9f9356db69f&pageId=64f1b7b4ed886d13a68cdd69&workflow=preview

Behaving plain text CMS field:

the behaving fields in the CMS
the behaving fields in the CMS1920×1265 245 KB

Behaving and clean (and scaleable) plain text fields on the front end:

behaving and clean
behaving and clean1836×1344 275 KB

Misbehaving plain text CMS field (with a random behaving plain text CMS field):

the misbehaving fields in CMS
the misbehaving fields in CMS1920×1467 369 KB

Misbehaving on the front end. Not legible. Not scalable for me yet.

misbehaving and a mess
misbehaving and a mess1920×1247 282 KB

Is that not wild?!

2

What you’re describing is more directly related to the history and design of HTML itself and how whitespace is handled. In your case, if you want the browser to handle your plaintext as pre-formatted content, then the relevant Webflow setting you probably want to use is;

Breaking: Pre-wrap.

image

3

Hi Michael – thanks for the reply.

So I am up to speed on the breaking tools.

image
image1920×686 158 KB

Here’s the thing:

  • There are plain text fields on the actual CMS Collection item’s form that hold line breaks.

  • That same CMS Collection also has plain text fields that will not hold line breaks. Seemingly no matter how I add line breaks to the form or paste text with line breaks to the form field, they disappear when I click away.

The strangest part is:

If on the Designer side I connect a plain text field that is holding line breaks on the CMS form, then it does on the Designer side and when published. Okay, cool.

Then if I unlink the Designer text box from that property and re-link it to one of the plain text properties that don’t hold line breaks, and it won’t have line breaks on the Designer side or when published. No changes to the Designer text box. Pre-wrap set.

Because of this it seems like an issue in the CMS, not in Designer.

Really though the bigger issue is that some of the plain text fields hold half of the content’s line breaks but not the other half. In the same property field on the CMS form.