Nested Lists Help | Display all collection articles for each Collection category?

Design help CMS
1

Hey,

Check out this video going over the problem: Loom | Free Screen & Video Recording Software | Loom

Inside the CMS, I have two collections, one called articles and the other called article categories. Article categories have a multi-reference field to Articles.

I’m trying to create an articles page outside of the CMS templates that list a collection of article categories. Under each article category, should be a list of associated articles. It currently looks like this:

Screenshot 2023-03-23 at 4.50.10 PM
Screenshot 2023-03-23 at 4.50.10 PM1372×1628 143 KB

In the image above, I have nested CMS collections. The first collection is a list of categories, the nested collection must be a multi-reference field of connected articles.

Screenshot 2023-03-23 at 4.42.17 PM
Screenshot 2023-03-23 at 4.42.17 PM920×540 28.5 KB

There doesn’t seem to be a way to connect the multi-reference field in article categories to the article collection. It would be great if the article could automatically show up inside of the article category under the multi-reference, but it doesn’t seem to work that way. The only other way I could see to do this would be to create multiple collection lists on this page and filter each one by its corresponding category. And create a static category heading.

Unfortunately, if we add more categories in the future, there would be no way to dynamically add that category to the page. We’d have to go in and add it manually.

The other method I’ve tried is adding a collection list of all articles, and then sorting the list by category. That gives us a list of all of the categories per individual article. So that is not a solution.

any thoughts on a way to do this?

BTW, I know my naming convention is not the best…

I can not create a public share link due to company privacy.

2

in short, multi-refs and nested lists are very limited. They’re useful for some things, but it’s a pretty narrow spectrum.

There are a few approaches you can take depending on what you’re wanting to achieve, and the specifics of the view you’re creating ( in Webflow, knowing the constraints is essential in building your layout design ).

One approach is to invert the relationship, so that each item references a category, preferably as a single-ref. Then you’d need a collection list for each category, but you’d have sorting, filtering, and no 5-item limit on the nested list.

Another approach is Finsweet’s CMS Nest attribute, which has it’s own mechanism for assembling your lists dynamically.

Here are some notes I’ve put together that might help you understand how you can approach this with less headaches-