Is it possible to enable pagination on a collection list that is set to ‘Random, Shuffle,’ without displaying the same item more than once on subsequent pages?
And if not, is it something that’s on the roadmap and/or are there any workarounds in the meantime?
I have a couple of collection lists with both of the above enabled, but the result is that some items are displayed multiple times. A page with an example of the issue is: ‘Places to Eat and Drink on the Rame Peninsula’. The main collection on this page on has 40 items in it, and pagination is set to 30 per page. However, both page 1 & 2 display 30 items each (screenshot below).
I don’t have an answer for you, but when pagination was announced I did wonder how this would work with random sort. Unfortunately this is what I thought might happen.
My suggestion for THIS page is to just display all 40 items for now. It’s only 10 more items and will avoid confusing visitors. The other option is to not use random for now.
Thanks for coming back to me man. Yeah, this is what I expected too.
As you say, not too much of an issue for this collection/page with only 40 items, but another collection on this site has 150 items making it unusable from a UX standpoint, as the user may be presented with the same listing up to 5 times.
The necessity of the random sort order of course is to keep things fair for all listings i.e. each will appear on the first page at some point. Using any other sort order will result in certain listings always appearing first (without manual intervention), giving them a (perceived) competitive advantage.
@brjohnson Do you know if this is something that is possible / in plan?
Any news on this? – I was bummed when I found out pagination breaks the shuffle order I had going. Now I am not sure what to do
My idea was to use this in the sidebar of related articles. Using pagination + finsweet load more would be awesome so the user always gets new things to explore and has the option to load more and more. Just like youtube’s sidebar when you are watching a video.
My approach for sidebars is to use random order + a limit, to feature a few random bits… featured products, testimonials, quotes, etc.
Then below that, is a button to view all of them, which navigates to a full-page paginated view, that is NOT randomly ordered. In those views I’ll generally show newest at the top.
@Reapertips I have a cloneable here that does most of what you need. I’d recommend you stick to the 100 limit, and avoid pagination, but set your collection list to random sorting. My sorting library works on top of that, and will resort that 100 on every page load… giving you X random items on every refresh, of 100 that are randomly picked every 12h.
If for some reason you really need > 100 collection items loaded, you could write some script to de-paginate the list before the sort happens, but that’s slow and ugly… you’re forcing a visitor to load collection-item-count / 100 pages when they just wanted 1.
If you have a known and reasonable # of items, say 250, you could have divide them into sets of 100 by adding a grouping field or a range constraint, and put e.g. 3 collection lists on your page. One visible, 2 hidden. Then move all of the items from lists 2 and 3 into list 1 to combine them before my library sorts. That’s much faster since Webflow pulls all that data you need in a single page request.
