I design websites with Webflow. And CMS feature is handy to make a better design. I can do collections for a real life data and create a new design for it.
But i can’t export my design… Ok, i can, but there is no data in it. No menus, no sample article, no tags. Only “NO ITEMS FOUND.”
It would be really handy to be able to get source code with data from CMS included. I don’t need all the articles. But all the Pages and Collection Templates i designed to look the same as in the Designer.
Webflow has been really great for me as a more visual interface to managing the structure, layout, and content of a website.
I would also love to be able to export CMS data. I feel a little insecure telling clients that they should feel comfortable building up a large set of blog posts, products, etc. when I know that, if they later decide to switch platforms for any reason, they’ll have a hard time getting their data out of Webflow and into the new platform.
The way I understand it is that right now the only option (besides manually recreating the data) is to save the front-facing HTML and grab the data out of that.
What would be really valuable to me would be an export feature (to JSON or an SQLite database maybe) and an import feature that accepts data of the same format.
This relates to a data import feature as well, like discussed here:
I understand that it’s a lot of work to support all kinds of different formats for importing. I would be more than happy with just a single shared format for both importing and exporting. That seems easier to implement, and the bare functionality seems more important than any specific compatibilities (at least to me).
In my “wish list” world, there would be one API endpoint /export that would return an SQLite database of the data collections. Another endpoint /import would accept an SQLite database using the same schema as the exported database.
The SQLite documentation does a great job of explaining why SQLite might be a good option for something like this: SQLite As An Application File Format
I’d love to hear what you smart people at @webflow think about that kind of thing!