Importing CMS items into a Webflow Localized CMS

Design help CMS
1

Hello everyone,

We recently made a company-wide decision to adopt Webflow Localization to streamline our processes and enhance our website’s functionality. This involves reworking our site to fully leverage the advanced Localization plan we’ve subscribed to (which, admittedly, is quite pricey).

Here’s the challenge:

We currently have three CMS collections, each containing 150+ items. Let’s call them A, B, and C. CMS A is in English, and CMS B and C are duplicates in two other languages. With Webflow Localization, we can now consolidate this into a single CMS and manage different language versions using the localization feature.

I was hoping to simplify this transition by importing CMS A, B, and C into the new website and linking them through Webflow Localization. However, when I attempted this, I encountered an issue:

  • After importing CMS A under the English locale, I switched to Locale B and imported CMS B. This resulted in CMS B having 300+ items, while CMS A remained at 150+.

Is there a way to natively import and link CMS A, B, and C in Webflow Localization? Or will we need to manually translate and update multiple fields for each item after importing CMS A?

Any insights or solutions would be greatly appreciated!

2

I did try creating only 3 items into my CMS in English, then exporting them to get the Item ID, and using that Item ID to import the Localized CMS, but that didn’t work, and if I add the Locale ID, when I try to import, Webflow doesn’t recognize this field like it does with the Item ID.

3

My understanding was that you need the Item ID, plus a Locale ID, in order to do a localized import.

  • Create your base locale content in the CMS
  • Export a localized view to get the Item IDs and Locale ID
  • Modify your CSV with the new content
  • Re-import

I believe that was the intended process, but you are probably best to just contact support.

I’m suspicious however; I ran into a different issue with localization recently in relation to how it manages locale-specific drafting and creation of items. I think the Webflow team may have changed something that could be impacting CSV import as a side effect.

I’d try localizing the CMS within Webflow first to ensure there is a localized version of every CMS item, and then do the process above. This will ensure that your import is updating localized records that already exist.

4

Thanks for your reply Michael, you always on top of it.

The Locale ID I get, when I export the CMS A, should I change it to a Locale ID for the CMS B?

5

For those that find this in the future, this is what I did to make it work:

  1. Import your primary language CMS file first

  2. Export this primary language CMS and note the unique Item IDs

  3. Add those Item IDs to your second language CSV file in a new column, matching them to the original content, for me it was easy because I named all my CMS content in order, 001, 002, 003, etc. across languages.

  4. In Webflow, switch to your target language, then import the new CSV. When prompted, select “Update existing items” rather than creating new entries

That worked for me, hopefully it works for you as well.

6

A variation of this might be easier for some is;

2 - Switch to your alt locale, then export the CMS to get that locale specifically.

3 - Load that CSV into e.g. Google Sheets and then modify the localized content per item. Leave the ItemID, LocaleID as-is.

Re-import / update with the new CSV in that locale.

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