Easiest way to nest an independent collection into another?

Design help CMS
1

Ok, so I’m building the template of a dynamic page and I want it to have a dynamic menu as well.

The menu is supposed to have a bunch of dropdowns all mapped to Collection A. So:

Menu:

  • Collection Item 1
  • Collection Item 2
  • Collection Item 3
    …
    and every time I add a new item to Collection A, a new dropdown is created. So far so good. But now, I also want to nest a bunch of links from Collection B inside the dropdown. I figured it’d be great to create a 2nd collection list inside my first collection but… wait a minute, I cannot link that list to any collections that aren’t referenced inside my Collection A? Why?

So, ok, let’s create a multi-reference field inside my Collection A that links to Collection B. But now, all my items in collection A are empty… I need to manually search and select new items from collection B every time they’re created. That’s completely unsustainable or scalable. So I figured there must be another way.

Been searching for hours and no luck in a simple solution tho. What gives?

2

Yep, Webflow designed nested lists as a master-detail feature, so it doesn’t make sense to nest un-related CMS content.

Note nested lists are limited to 5 items as well, which may not suit your intended use case.

Yep, again, the point is a master-detail presentation. You need to describe that relationship in order for Webflow to know what to show.

I’m struggling to imagine what you’re actually trying to achieve here, but if there’s a reason you want a collection list of dropdowns that are all populated with the exact same list of links from an unrelated collection, you can do that with custom JS or Finsweet’s CMS Next.