Including current CMS item in a multi-reference field + sorting them in the collection list

Hi everyone,
I’m currently working for a client on a blog migration. This blog as over 1400 articles in it and most of them are split. So you’ll get part 1/2/3/4/5… of the articles as multiples URLs, which works very well for SEO reasons.
To translate that to Webflow, I’ve created a CMS collection called “article” and in it a multi-reference field referencing to “article”. I’ve then created in my article template a collection list calling this multi-reference field.

With this method, I get a result very close to what I’m looking to achieve. I just have 2 issues to resolve.

  1. Sort in the order of the parts :
    For this issue, I’ve added a field name “multi-article steps”. In theory, I would like to just assign the number of the part here, and make it appear depending on that number in the page.
    But when in the article page, using a collection list calling the multi-reference field, I can’t sort with the step field, or at all for that matter.

  2. Self referencing the current article
    In the collection list item, I would like to make all the parts of the article, including the current one. To do that, I need the current article appearing in the multi-reference field. I haven’t found any way of achieving this.

In my opinion, a way to resolve my issues would be to create a separate CMS collection to group all the article together, but as I said, I’m migrating over 1400 articles and that would mean doing this manually.

Please let me know if you have any idea of how to achieve this while keeping a single CMS collection for articles.

Thank you so much for any help you can give me (and don’t hesitate to ask me for any additional information)


Here is my public share link: Webflow - LI complet