How to create a forum with Webflow fast and without coding!

Community resources Webflow Tips
1

Hey everyone :wave: !

In the past, Webflow would be one of the last tools people would think of for building a forum. But with the emergence of new 3rd party apps, Webflow is now a fantastic option for building one, especially when you consider the following advantages it possesses over other website, web app, & community development tools:

1) SEO - If you are building a community forum, chances are organic traffic will be one of your most important acquisition channels. Out of the box, Webflow offers best-in-class technical SEO and tools (clean code, fast page speed, meta data, minifying, etc.) that maximize the likelihood of new pages of user generated content not only being indexed on search engines, but also ranking higher.

2) Design flexibility - This is a matter of preference. But if you wanted to create a community forum with unique design that matches your brand, instead of directing users to a community platform with generic out of box design, Webflow is a fantastic choice. With Webflow, you can custom-design every aspect of your forum in a visual editor, completely no-code.

How can I create a community forum on my Webflow site?

The tool we are going to use in this tutorial is Supersparks, which enables forums within a Webflow site in 5 minutes and gives you the freedom to custom-design every aspect of your forum in the Webflow Designer.

There are three installation methods: 1) New site from a template, 2) Add template to existing project, or 3) From scratch, which we will both cover in this tutorial. After signing up to Supersparks, you can get started with the installation :backhand_index_pointing_down::

Template Installation (New Site)

Templates greatly speed up the process of designing and developing a new forum from scratch in Webflow. All of our templates can be adapted in the Webflow designer. If you would prefer to start from the ground up, we recommend skipping to the from scratch section of this guide. To help you through the installation process of creating a forum from a template, we created a YT tutorial:

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Template Installation (Add To Existing Website)

If you would like to use a template with an existing Webflow project, be sure to check out this article, which dives into this further into this method.

From scratch installation

The rest of this tutorial will be focused on implementing Supersparks with the ‘from scratch’ method. This method is ideal if none of the templates are your cup of tea and you would prefer to build your forum from the ground up in Webflow. For a full step-by-step guide, be sure to check out this tutorial for the from scratch installation of a forum using Supersparks.

Each from scratch installation has 4 key steps:

  1. Connecting CMS collections & fields in the Supersparks settings
  2. Pasting the Supersparks script
  3. Pasting the rich text editor form component to a static page
  4. Pasting the post page component to a the collection template page for forum posts
  5. Pasting the collection list component and connecting fields to their relevant elements

Basic from scratch installation should take less than 10 minutes. But there are many additional features to add with Supersparks and different ways you can customize the forum’s design beyond the basics.

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Thanks for reading! In case you have any questions, feedback, or get stuck do not hesitate to reach out to us at hello@supersparks.io :flexed_biceps:!

Supersparks community tool is brand new, but we have many exciting new features planned for the future. Stay tuned :popcorn:

2

Hi Ian Ruta, thank you for the tutorial.

I’m running my community with monthyl 100k visitors in Korea. It is powered by Bettermode. But its SEO functionalities are quite not good, so I’m willing to migrate my community to other platform. And it seems that Superspark + Webflow might be a good alternative.

But we are doing a lot of customization and automation in Bettermode. So I’m curious how customizable Superspark is.

For examples:

  • we need a customizable member page (profile page)
  • we need a webhook for almost all activities of a user
  • we need to add custom code snippet for post-writing page and published post

If you have a doc about how Superspark can be customized, it would be the best. If you don’t, can you please help me an idea how customizable it is?

3

Hi Tae :wave:. I just sent you a DM with a Loom. But just in case others have the same questions as you, below are a few answers:

  • Our tool offers extensive design flexibility and customization through our integration with Webflow’s Designer and CMS, which allows you to custom-design the layout, styling, and interactions of every element of your community site without code.
  • The page for members’ public profiles w/ content history (like this one) can be customized in the Webflow Designer. Memberstack also offers quite a few cool components for user account pages that can also be customized in Webflow.
  • The three membership tools we integrate with all have webhooks for all user account updates. We are planning on adding webhooks for user generated content generated created via our tool in the coming months. Just to clarify, our tool doesn’t offer a native membership feature. We are instead integrated with Webflow’s memberships feature, Memberstack, and Outseta, so we can focus on offering best in class community content capabilities.
  • You can definitely add code snippets in Webflow’s page settings, and they shouldn’t conflict with our tool :).

Thanks and speak soon!!
Ian