Memberships - Displaying User Specific Information

Design help General
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Hi

I’m trying to create a membership site for an investment business. This is basically an investor portal where users can log in and see the number of shares/units they own and check on the latest news from the business.

I’m using Webflow Memberships Beta but am struggling to find a way to display the number of shares/units on the homepage of the dashboard.

I have worked out that I can store the information in the user accounts, a CMS collection, or on AirTable. I can’t find a way to display this information on the homepage of the dashboard though.

Anyone have a solution to this problem yet?

Could this be done with some custom code? When the user loads the page could the custom code ask Webflow for the user ID and then use that to search an AirTable database?

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Hi @henry22 :wave: welcome to the forum.

It sounds like you want to associate a user with a specific CMS item, yes? If so, that’s not natively available yet with Webflow Memberships.

As an aside…

If I’m reading what I’ve mentioned above wrong, you can most certainly add items from the CMS to your canvas through CMS Collection Pages. Behind the scenes they bind a specific collection item (determined by the slug) to that page.

The problem is, to display specific items you must use a CMS Collection Page. The only other native Webflow option is to use a Collection List element on a static page with a filter. But it’s limiting.

Back to what I think you’re asking…

If you’d like to associate a specific Membership user to a CMS item you’ll need to get more creative, like you’ve already mentioned.

The common approach has been to use lookup tables for this.

Airtable.

Basically, store two unique ID’s (in this case a memberships user ID, or email address, and a collection item ID) in a datastore like Airtable and use a glue service like Make (Integromat) to lookup the one you have access to, and grab it’s associated ID.

The problem has been you couldn’t search the Webflow CMS. To access a CMS item, you had to have a specific CMS item ID.

That’s why you’d use Airtable. You can arbitrarily search through it.

Webflow Logic.

You couldn’t do that natively with Webflow, that is, until now.

Webflow released their new Logic feature which for the first time gives you the ability to search arbitrarily for most anything you like within your CMS Collection.

But again, all of these solutions require you to use CMS Collection Pages. If that’s too limiting, there are third party options.

Memberstack

If you use Memberstack they give you the ability to display user specific information on any page, for only that specific user, and no others.

It sounds like this is what you’re asking for :point_up_2:

Here are some screencasts & tutorials walking through how to setup all of this (if you’re not already familiar with it):

…and just generally a whole bunch of related tutorials here:

Hope that helps!

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Hi Chris, thanks for the help.

Your article on lookup tables you linked was interesting. I think the core of the problem here is that unlike MemberStack there doesn’t seem to be any way to retrieve the user ID when using Webflow Memberships:

I use MemberStack a lot, and I can get the MemberStack Member ID on any page a logged in member is on.

Without knowing what user we’re dealing with it seems like it will be impossible to display any user specific information. I don’t mind slightly complicated work arounds but so far I haven’t been able to find one. Maybe this is just a hard limitation of Webflow Memberships for now.

I could switch my site to MemberStack (I have played around with it in the past) and probably solve this issue, but if Webflow enables the the ability to retrieve the user ID or natively display user data in the near future I’d rather stick with them. If would be nice to have a public roadmap available.

Edit: I see someone has made a request for user IDs to be accessible: Allow 3rd party scripts to access the current | Webflow Wishlist

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Hi @henry22

You can get the user ID currently.

If you create a Webhook when the new user is added, it’ll give you that: Create Webhook

Another way is to use Webflow Logic, they return it to you there as well.

Here’s a tutorial walking through how to setup Webhooks with Webflow.

The problem start when displaying on the canvas, conditionally, based upon that user ID. You really can’t.

The only current way around that is to add this users info into a CMS item and use CMS Collection Pages to display it.

The lookup tables approach can give you that.

Those CMS Collection Pages will be password protected, but anyone with a password can access them (versus any anonymous visitor to the site).

So the typical approach has been to automatically create a slug for each user that is unlikely to be guessed.

For example…

https://site.webflow.io/users/45Rtf873Ds298Gvbfh40oiT

Ugly, but it’s unlikely someone with access to the site will guess it.

Now you can have membership specific pages and all the flexibility that comes along with CMS pages.

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Yeah, that’s what I was meaning. You can obtain and store them but they’re not that much use if you can’t then request the user ID on page load and search a database using it.

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