Multiple users on one site – struggling with workflows

We’re a design and UX agency currently trialling Webflow on a several major projects.

It looks like we can only have one person logged into a site to do work at a time (even though we’re working on several different webflow accounts).

This means that I can’t have UX people draft parts of the site while my graphic designers work on refining other parts. This is a pretty big problem. We can create parts of the site and export them, but we can’t import them back into Webflow. If there’s no easy work around for, this dramatically reduces webflow’s use to us as a creative / production tool.

Does anyone have any advice or experience attempting anything like this?

B

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Hi @iqcontent team. Currently we do not support real-time collaboration on team accounts. All of you members on your team account have access to all the sites on the team account, but only one member can edit a site at the same time.

It’s a tough nut to crack because syncing changes from one member can override changes of another member, but we will be tackling real-time collaboration sometime in the future. What is your current workflow? Would your members be working on different pages of the site? Or do you expect them to work on the same exact page of the site and expect to see each other’s changes appear live as they make their own changes?

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The plan for us was to have our UX people draft the structure of the page – or modules within it – on one page and allowing our designer to complete another page. Go straight from sketching to Webflow.

We have no need (in fact it would be impractical) for real time collaboration on one page. But building out a site that requires input from four people, when only one can access at a time, is tricky. Obviously, live updates from the CSS as it changes would be slick, although it could get messy very fast.

Our initial workaround ideas (copy and paste between sites, embedding code, export code to marry up externally – leading to version control problems, or manually update CSS and HTML within web flow) were either impractical or not supported.

Our current workaround is to work on separate sites, export, annotate and rebuild on one master site. We’re estimating that that process adds on an hour (ish) for our designer and an hour (ish) for our UX people.
This doesn’t sound like a lot, but if we have 10 templates that’s 20 hours extra work.

We’re trialling Webflow across the company at the moment and we’ve scaled it up to two pilot projects after good experiences on small scale stuff. We’re pretty positive about the experience but we’re clearly pushing up against what the tool was intended for – at least in it’s early iterations.

If we can be of any assistance in feeding back our experiences we’d be happy to do so.

Thanks.

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Thanks for the feedback!

But building out a site that requires input from four people, when only one can access at a time, is tricky.
Obviously, live updates from the CSS as it changes would be slick, although it could get messy very fast.

I can definitely see this, especially when you’re working with a more involved website. CSS changes that span different pages would be constantly changing - making it hard for collaboration in general. Definitely can be a messy process.

We’re pretty positive about the experience but we’re clearly pushing up against what the tool was intended for – at least in it’s early iterations.

It’s true - so far the tool is intended for a single person to edit one project at a time. Most sites are built this way, but we also know there multi-user collaboration workflows in agencies and some companies. It’s definitely something we’re thinking about in future iterations.

copy and paste between sites

We will be releasing this functionality after inline-styling and symbols. So hold tight for that. I can see a workflow like this: Duplicate a master site, edit parts of the site, copy edited or newly created parts and paste them into master site.

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Yep – that feature would definitely solve the issue, being functional, it not graceful.

We had a bit of a chat about what a nightmare it would be a with some sort of live updating css. An error or even small adjustments could be screwing things up all the way across the team.
We started to think that some sort of ‘checkout’ process might work. Like you check out a page to work on and, I guess work off a fork of the css. When you’re done check it back in, and the master css is married up with the fork. I’m sure you’ve already considered these sorts of options and I can already think of about 5 problems with that off the top of my head, we’re just trying to think about what would work best for us.

Happy to play Guinea pig on new features if you need testing out in the wild.

B

Yeah the “checkout” approach would be pretty need and powerful. It would be like working in git. We would have to design a whole new workflow for that - separate syncing, versions, pages. That can get really involved. Any solution (besides copy pasting) to the workflow problem would be a pretty big feature. It would pretty sweet though!

I’ll reach out when we get there. :slight_smile:

Hello,

Hello thesergie

We are a creative team and we’ve just trailing the organisation plan. We were very enthousiaste about webflow but the single user editing is a big problem.
The solution better than copy and past pages from websites to a master website is to allows designers to creates widgets and be able to export to any websites. Is these feature is on your road map. We really appreciate webflow and will be please to see this kind function included in webflow next iteration.

Regards

Richard

What do you mean by this? Are you saying having the ability to link some layout on a project and when you update it, a widget on the master page grabs the content from that project?

Hello @thesergie,

I am just started with Webflow,
Normally my SEO typewriter is loging in, and doing his job.
but i just found out that that is not possible while i am working on another website than he would.
Sorry, but you Weblfow have to change that, now the time for making a website is going double…
That means we can not get our deadline…

No excuses, just say: We gonna work on that!
Thanks already! :wink:

We are working on improving this workflow so many people can edit the content of a site at the same time. Some someone can edit the design and another person can edit content. This would be possible for published sites.

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Maybe you can start a Uservoice (www.uservoice.com)

Because maybe my ideas are for another not so important…

Thought I’d mention a Uservoice competitor here, called Helprace. Their feedback and support portal can be taken on a quick test run, and even used for free with three staff members. I do think Uservoice is a great solution but the lack of negative voting throws it off for my needs…To each their own, though!

Please add this feature!!

It would be a nice feature to have for sure. Live editing by everyone on one page, but I can see the giant hirnets nest it woukd open if some of the designers arent very familiar with webflow.

Hi thesergie, I understand this question as somewhat of a workaround to not being able to collaborate on one site. As I’m experiencing the same issue, I’ll put it another way: if I have a team of 3 can we each create ‘sites’ where we create disparate elements of a full site that we we are co-creating and then pull them together into the single site?

Not at the moment because we don’t yet support copy-paste across different webflow sites. But we’re getting close to a solution for this so it’s not far off!

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Yo yo Webflow peeps!
You want Webflow to improve how you can collaborate on sites? Help us out by filling out this feedback form:

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