Link to a CMS 'static page' URL field and view within the Designer, pre-publishing

[Benni (Ben Thomas)]

Hi All,

Relatively new to Webflow and first-time on the forums, but I’m stuck and need some help with what I suspect is easy - but can’t get my head around it.

I have a collection in the CMS of various stories. On the Home page, I’ve added a collection list with a series of ‘cards’ that draw upon various fields in this CMS collection, such as title, images, post-summary, etc.

What they don’t do however is link to Collection Pages. Because I want to be able to style each story page uniquely - and my understanding is Collection Pages are a consistent template - I’ve made the story pages as static pages. However, these static pages once again have various collection lists to pull in the data - title, images, etc.

Where I’m stuck is that on the Home page I want to assign directions to the link in the collection list to direct to the slug of each story in the CMS collection. But I don’t seem to be able to select slug under element settings?

I have read a few similar posts, and created a ‘static link field’ in the CMS collection, but it seems I need to have an actual published URL here to reference. I want to be able to view and test the links in the Designer, and also have URLs that I won’t need to manually update for lots of collection items once the project’s published under a custom URL.

Read-only link below? Anyone got any suggestions?

Thanks so much!

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Here is my public share link:

https://preview.webflow.com/preview/online-exhibition-template?utm_medium=preview_link&utm_source=designer&utm_content=online-exhibition-template&preview=7e82b9f7af08d7850d0cfbce92c1fe78&workflow=preview

[webdev (Jeff Selser)]

I think what you are looking for is relative links. Only the path from the root of the site is added so the link is relative. Instead of https://www.example.com/somepage the relative link would be /somepage. Only problem is they won’t work in the designer but would on the site published wherever.

[Benni (Ben Thomas)]

Hi Jeff,

Many thanks for that; does sound like a relative link is what I’m after. The issue is that that’s how I initially approached it in the ‘static link field’ I’d created in the Collection, but it won’t let me save it in that form, coming up with the error msg (attached) that it needs to be a valid URL.

So, that’s my first problem; I can only enter a valid URL for it to save. The second obviously is I’d really like to be checking all these page links are active and working in the Designer, rather than publishing first to check.

Hoping there are others that have blog-style websites, that use a mix of static and collection pages, that have hit this wall?