I’ve been using Webflow for a while now for various smaller projects and am working my way through a more complex one now where I’ve hit a few roadblocks. I’m hoping to put together a solution in which I can offer a “collection tracking” site using Webflow CMS as the back-end for users to “check off” against their account. I’ve already got the framework set up for keeping track of the items themselves as a master list in the CMS (which is fantastic because I can create a variety of collections based around different item features), but now I’m stuck on how to handle the next piece:
Allowing users to sign up for an account (paid) and then track their collection against the master list (hosted via the CMS).
If anyone has any pointers on where to look or what to use to accomplish this I’d be greatly appreciative – if there are options that are not paid (i.e. Memberstack) then those would be preferred (to keep cost to users low) but at the end of the day I’m open to any valid ideas.
Webflow’s CMS was designed for content, i.e. published items like products, events, blog posts, recipes. It was never designed as a general-purpose database, so it does not have features that a normal database would, such as a query language.
Likewise, Memberships is new, at least for the forseeable future, Webflow does not offer the ability to “link” CMS items to a specific Membership User.
In a word, you’re entirely on your own with this.
It is technically possible to create what you’ve described above ( assuming no other special requirements like securing data ) using Memberships + the Sygnal Attributes User Info library + an automation platform like Make or Zapier, but you will have a lot of work building out the integrations and protecting your CMS data.
Unless you’re doing this as a hobby, I wouldn’t recommend this approach.
Memberstack adds a more mature memberships platform, and gives you a User ID, which improves somethings, but you’ll still have all of the CMS and automation issues to content with.
The stack you really need for this type of system is probably Webflow + Wized + a separate data storage solution like Airtable or Xano. That lets you store user-specific data, build user-specific views using that user-specific data much more reliably.
This is fantastic - have you used this approach on anything scaled significantly beyond the sample code usage? I don’t expect significant user volume given it will be a paid feature but each user will be tracking a “checklist” of up to a couple thousand items at maximum. I’m wondering what the limitations might be of using the Memberstack JSON object, if any?
Clarity for anyone who finds this in the future - I am still searching for additional options in this space to best approach the topic. Memberstack has proven difficult for the scale that I need - the member JSON that Chris references using above has a character limit of 5000, which makes it quite difficult to use for my scenario as there are around 2000 items to track
In that case, you may be able to use something like NoCodeAPI for your needs. It’ll be more effort than a drop-in solution but also gives more flexibility when passing data back & forth.
If that works, then the only missing puzzle piece is associating that to a specific user.
Again, if you’re taking the Memberstack route you can verify the currently logged in user across platforms.
Here is a screencast walking through a solution of exactly that with their v1 platform, things will have changed slightly with their v2 platform:
