Many-to-many CMS relationship & ACL/user management

Hi All,

Huge fan of Webflow, build 5 websites with it now and exploring the options to (re)build a more complex website with it.

The project has 2 major difficulties:

  1. CMS capabilities and linking items together:
    I’m trying to build a public database with profiles of companies, their employees (users), their clients, their offices, industry events/conferences, jobs etc. Most of these things are linked to each other so that when you go to a conference detail page, you can see the people and companies attending and who you ho to a job you can see the company profile and people working there etc etc… The frontend will list all items per category on an overview page and each item will have a detail page. All items need to be searchable and on the overview page I need to be able to add some filters to improve searches.

So these are many-to-many relations, afaik Webflow only doesn’t one-to-many relationships and this is currently not possible with Webflow (but I’d love someone to prove me wrong :)).

  1. Managing all these items with 100s of users: this is gonna be a big database and people need to be able to claim/manage their own content. This is definitely not possible with Webflow.

I was thinking: maybe I can separate the frontend (Webflow) and use a different backend system that stores all content, handles the many-to-many relationships between all content items and has some ACl/user management system and have that sync with the Webflow CMS.

Does anyone have ideas about or experience with such a solution connected to Webflow? Or any other solutions you might see to this challenge: I’m all ears :).

Honestly, this is a better use case for a CMF/CMS system like processwire. It can support millions of pages, and supports deeply nested and related structures. I have built similar systems using it. You can style a processwire site by designing in webflow then incorporating that into the templates if you would like. It does require decent PHP and IA skills, but the API is a dream.

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