New feature: CSV import

Announcements Updates
1

Hey everyone!

Excited to officially release CSV import today - which makes it a whole lot easier to migrate content from another platform to the Webflow CMS. For all the details, you can:

We’re looking forward to seeing what you build! Happy designing :slight_smile:

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2

That’s awesome thank you guys :webflow_heart:

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3

Just looked through all of the documentation, super simple! Wow. Thanks Webflow

4

Still no exporting and documentation still needs improvement.

For one, can you not format headers and blockquotes etc into a Rich Text item?

For the love of all things, just allow exporting. If I need to move everything from one collection to another, I have to delete EVERYTHING INDIVIDUALLY and I still have yet to understand how to import multiple items into one field or how Rich Text items work.

Is Webflow even listening or are they so caught up in being jealous that other people could leave Webflow, that these limitations are specifically implemented at the cost of a better user experience? Clearly not implementing exporting and not allowing bulk selection/deletion/duplication/archiving is terrible UX.

Gotta be straight forward and up front because it just seems like Webflow doesn’t listen and really doesn’t care. Makes me wonder. When a company is not transparent enough, assumptions are made. And almost everyone does not fill those assumptions with happy, tingly thoughts. It’s always going to be negative.

I can’t help wondering this when Webflow has time and time again ignored wide request to allow exporting.

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5

Hey @ELiTE - thanks for the feedback. We were planning on including CMS export with this release but ran into some issues/questions around hosted images. Once we work that out we’ll be able to offer an export solution within the Designer.

At the same time, we’re actively working on bulk actions within the CMS - this is something we’ve had on our list for a while, and now it becomes even more important when you’re working with major data imports from a CSV. So we hear you on that! And in the meantime, we appreciate everyone’s patience while we work on getting these features out.

As for your questions on Rich Text Elements - I’d encourage you to reach out to our support team with a bit more detail about your specific questions, and they’ll be happy to help you out!

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6

Very nice work with the feature!
I was hoping that I could use it to work around another long-requested feature - the ability to rename collections.
So I did a JSON export using the CMS API and converted the JSON to CSV to import it.
Howeeeeever, I ran into two problems:

  1. How do I handle special/private fields like Draft?
  2. What to do with fields that reference other fields?

Keep up the fantastic work!

7

Thanks @Simon_Lessing!

  1. You aren’t able to set items to draft or archive during import - you’ll need to manually set this after import. (One caveat: if an item you attempt to import doesn’t meet a certain field validation requirement — like min/max characters on a plain text field, for example — that item will be imported as a draft).
  2. References also need to be set manually after import, since imported content doesn’t “know” about its relation to the other content in your CMS.

Hope this provides some clarity around how to achieve what you’ve got in mind!

8

Thank you. This is the kind of information that should be in an announcement or Webflow Blog (but more details is always awesome). It comforts me to know that CMS export was planned and the specific issues that occurred with it.