How many of you use external CMS with Webflow?

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On a few of my recent builds I keep hitting a wall in the Webflow CMS with a few key missing features such as a repeater grid or table and user auth. I am wondering if a lot of you integrate a third party CMS into your workflow when you need advanced functions beyond the Webflow CMS? I am familiar with Craft CMS and Statamic and could easily add them after exporting, but how do you handle design changes once the site is exported and CMS coded? Is there some easy way to merge the new design files into the old files without having to rewrite CMS code again?

Is there a better CMS that allows you to add the CMS code markup right in Designer?

Is there any way to extend Webflow to add additional field types?

I prefer to keep all in Webflow, but some of the features like a table field have been requested since 2014 and have no signs of being added any time soon.

Any advice? I need all this so clients can easily edit. Creating a collection for every table is not feasible on a larger site. It needs to be within the entry itself like a field type.

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Webflow CMS is very powerful tool (A lot of Field Types, if-visible, limit items, multi-reference fields).

Table is a nightmare on any CMS :slight_smile: (Will work fine only for simple tables). Anyway, I agree this is a very cool feature.
https://docs.craftcms.com/v2/table-fields.html

Of course like any other issue on dev world - by custom code, you have more freedom.

The only dynamic option Which I think of with Webflow CMS is converting data to a table (But sound little complex + All styles by custom code).

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/5180382/convert-json-data-to-a-html-table

Beside tables - what more missing ==> you find in craft?

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I love the Webflow CMS and I would like to use it on all projects. There are just a few features missing that would make it awesome such as:

  1. A Table or Grid field
  2. User Auth to protect pages and CMS content
  3. Multi-image and multi-file fields
  4. RTE needs a way to insert links to local files like PDFs
  5. A List field for CMS would be handy also

Some of these may be in the works, but these are the issues I have had so far with The CMS.

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Its important to notice that its not a HTML table to show frontend. Its a grid layout to allow for repeating rows of data, storing as perhaps an array. So for example if the editor is writing an food recipe and needs to add ingredients. RTE won’t work here as its important to wrap every ingredient with correct markup for schema markup for Google. If a repeater field the developer has full markup control of every ingredient.

Same goes for opening hours or other repeating content that needs correct markup surrounding every line/info.

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Exactly…Repeating rows of data in a grid is what I meant also. This would be a field within the CMS.

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I use ProcessWire often when I need more. You generate all output so you can use webflow to theme. All your list items are natively addressed.

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How do you go about IF you need to go back and make changes after the site is exported and CMS coded? Since we cannot reimport do you just use Git Diff or Merge to see what has changed? I looked at PW and it looks nice. I am also very familiar with Craft and Statamic, but the workflow part is what is holding me back. I was trying to find a CMS where the markup could be added in Designer so the CMS code stays in place on each export, but I guess that may not be possible.

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I use git. Take a look at markup regions in PW. For animations, interactions, I prototype with wf, then implement with JS as needed. Once you have a site built, wf becomes your style guide / design tool. I prefer managing SCSS for site styles, and move away from “classitis” as fast as possible. No different than building out comps in Sketch. Just wf is faster when collaborating with the client.

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