Now it's easier to move between the Designer and the Editor

Announcements Updates
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Plus, we made a few naming changes.

Designing with Webflow CMS inevitably takes a bit of jumping between the Designer and the website, so we thought we’d make that process a little faster and easier for you all.

So, as of now, you’ll see a few new navigational options. When you’re in the Designer, clicking the W icon now opens a handy little menu with links to your Dashboard and the Editor:

And the reverse is also true! When you’re in the Editor, just click the hamburger menu, Webflow logo, or (if you’re using CMS Branding) your logo or your client’s, and you’ll see quick links to the Dashboard and Designer.

Note: only the site owner and Team plan members will see this menu.

Of course, you can still access the Designer and Editor from your Site Settings:

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About those naming changes

And, as you’ve probably noticed by now: we’ve updated naming for the on-site editing experience from CMS to Editor.

The tabbed interface where you access and edit pages and Collections, plus create new Collection Items, is now the Editor Panel.

We made this change because the CMS encompasses aspects of both the Designer (Collections Panel and Collection Page Templates) and the on-site editing experience.

We’ve also updated “Content Editor” to “Collaborator,” because we’ll eventually have many different types of Collaborator, with Content Editor being just one of them. :slight_smile:

We’ll be updating Help Center content to reflect these changes.

Enjoy the faster and easier task-switching!

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Nice, definitely looking forward for those multiple collaborators!

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Can you disable this? I don’t use the CMS and if I click the editor button by accident, it freezes and causes me to have to restart my browser. Please incorporate a checkbox to enable/disable this in the site’s settings.

I’d much prefer if you guys left the settings button where it was and just added an editor button below it instead of that annoying click dropdown thing you have now. You have that entire left panel with basically nothing in it except the top few buttons, why complicate things with a click dropdown like that?

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Have to agree. That’s one extra click every time I want to go back to the dashboard. I really don’t switch between the Designer and Editor (ever) but do switch between designer and dashboard often.

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This to me makes no sense at all… “Content Management System” explains exactly what you can do. Changing this to “Editor” makes it SO AMBIGUOUS and conveys a different message.

I get the feeling that this “Editor” will be bundled with more features in future to justify why it costs 3 times more for my site to have a CMS ($5 → $15p/m).

This is my initial rant

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@Aidz The CMS is not 3X more. Basic hosting is $5/month and CMS is $10/month… https://webflow.com/pricing. It’s surprising that users want Webflow to offer hosting for nearly free. For what you get (manged, speed, Amazon AWS, Fastly CDN) the hosting price isn’t bad. CDN alone is a $10 add on at some managed Wordpress quality hosting services.

The name Editor makes sense to me because you have the CMS in both the Designer and Editor areas. So if a client has their own account (site) this makes it easier to stay on the same page.

I don’t like the two clicks it takes to switch between the designer and dashboard now though. Simply because when designing a site I rarely go to the now Editor area.

@jmw Just to confirm, clients wont see the Designer and Dashboard options from the Editor if the site is under my hosting plan…correct?

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That is very correct.

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I totally agree with @DFink - it’s a little annoying since I now have to click three times to get to the main account dashboard.

Originally thought it would be cool as I thought it was going to actually take me to my main acct dashboard - which would be a nice shortcut, instead it takes me to my site’s settings.

I haven’t used the CMS aspect yet either, glad I didn’t click on the editor button yet :slight_smile:

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I will vote for the separated buttons for Dashboard and Editor too :confused:

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Yep, as @samliew notes, clients won’t see it unless they’re on a Team plan with you

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Agreed, i would like the option to turn this off. Seperate buttons please :blush:

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Thanks for the feedback all! We’re updating the menu to include the Dashboard in the menu so you can jump there very quickly. In the Editor we have the same list. :blush:

In the Designer

In the Editor

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I think the confusion users are having can be traced to the conceptual model of having two separate interfaces, rather than one. When adding content, a person can later ‘edit’ that content as well. When designing the presentation of content, a person can later ‘edit’ that design as well. So the fundamental underlying conceptual model of calling the content view the ‘editor’ is fundamentally broken, because a person can ‘edit’ both content and design. Editing is a function of the process, not of the concern. It might be better to call one interface ‘content’ and the other ‘design’ in the interim, but ultimately separating these concerns into two separate interfaces feels a little unnecessary. One possible solution would be to have one interface and the left panel would be for content, while the right panel would be for design. Different users would see different controls on both sides based on their access privileges, but it would move webflow away from having two separate interfaces were it does not seem necessary and ultimately leads to confusion for users.

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@rchrdnsh The Editor will always be an easy-to-use interface for collaborators (clients, team members, etc) to edit their website. The designer is too advanced and overwhelming for these types of users so a totally different UX paradigm is required. The Designer will always be the “backend” or the “admin” for a website and the Editor will be used once everything is set up. There will be overlap between the two (ex: editing content on the site or editing page SEO settings), but they serve two different purposes and two different user types. Therefore they should have specifically-tailored experiences to fit their user’s needs.

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I stand by my request to have separate buttons for each of those options. You have plenty of room on the left pane to do this. A popup selector like that is completely unnecessary in my opinion and has started to become cumbersome in my workflow.

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@thesergie I like the option in the designer to go “site settings” or straight to the “dashboard”. However, I’d prefer to see the “site settings” replaced by “custom code” or maybe and additional option. My work flow usually bounces between the custom code and the designer. And I think @DFink makes a good point still that there is room for the buttons in the designer interface without the dropdown…but I’m getting use to the extra click.

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