In case you haven’t noticed, Webflow has removed CMS Shuffle — without any notice or announcement. At least, I didn’t hear anything about it.
By chance, a customer noticed last week that the images on their website were no longer being delivered randomly, but in a static order.
Until x days ago, the items were still being shuffled every 12 hours. A great feature for almost 10 years.
The feature is still there, but it only shuffles the CMS items once when publishing the site – that’s it. What nonsense! What’s the point of that?
I don’t know what you think about it, but for me it means that I now have to go through all my projects to either implement a workaround with JavaScript.
Or I even have to make conceptual changes, because, for example, background images come from the CMS and are displayed randomly.
In my opinion, it’s absolutely outrageous that features are removed without notice. Regardless of the consequences for us (e.g., extra work) and our customers.
Ah yeegs yeah that definitely changes things - I didn’t realize you were saying the docs indicated a change. Thanks for sharing support’s response too, I really appreciate it.
Indeed Webflow’s much better than that, and this could definitely have been communicated far better- at the bare minimum, a designer popup or feature deprecation note and some advance warning for those who rely on it.
Tbh I prefer the re-sort on every page refresh approach that JS gives, but that was a very handy feature I’ve also used for years.
Yeah, Webflow’s new “shuffle” just randomizes on publish, not on load anymore. Easiest workaround is a little JS snippet to reshuffle the CMS items client-side , had to add this for a gallery build last week.
This previously worked perfectly using the native function, which could be combined with a limiter. How can I achieve this with JavaScript?
In addition, with a JavaScript solution, all items are always loaded, which certainly has a negative impact on loading time. With 24 items, it might still be okay. But what about 50 or 100?
That should give you everything you need, in attribute form.
In much more advanced cases, I have a special technique for “modifying” how FS Load works so that I can dynamically adjust its pagination, even as the browser is resized.
However that was build for FS v1 and I FS v2 doesn’t have a Javascript API yet.
I installed your solution (random list items + limit items per breakpoint) for two collection lists on the homepage, and it works perfectly! There’s no noticeable lag (according to Lighthouse), which was a bit of a concern for me. Great, thanks very much!
Just one question regarding GDPR: Is it necessary to load this font from Google?
Hi Sancho, great to hear, and excellent question- IIRC I use redacted as part of the wfu-preload capabilities, to ensure something is visible before the libraries run.
I can’t think of any important use case for that in SA5 HTML. I’ll have a look.
EDIT: The redacted font was used in a deprecated feature- a rich text hierarchical lists feature that predates Webflow’s support for hierarchical lists. It was part of the preloader there and is no longer needed.
Update to v 5.8.8, it no longer includes the google font reference.
