Hi Everyone,
I was wondering if you could share with me your team’s publishing workflow for editing and designing in Webflow with multiple people editing, and while NOT using Webflow’s Enterprise solution. As our team has expanded, I’m wondering what procedure to follow to prevent publishing other team members’ work in progress.
In the past, our content Editors only created blog posts, and since they worked on these posts in Draft and then either published them individually or scheduled them to publish later, I didn’t have to worry about them publishing the whole site while I was in the process of making changes in the Designer. And since they were only working on new posts saved in Draft, they didn’t have to worry about me publishing their work while in progress while I was publishing the whole site in the Designer (often publishing repeatedly while trying to troubleshoot problems).
Now our team has expanded to another content Editor who will be editing live static pages which means that they’ll need to publish the whole site when changes are made. So now I do need to worry about them publishing my work while still in progress while in the Designer, and they now need to worry about me publishing their work while still in progress because they are no longer editing pages while still in Draft.
I’ve come up with a workflow process to use for now, but it’s not ideal, so I thought I’d share it with you all to see if you have some suggestions for a better workflow:
Because those working in the Editor cannot see who else is working on the site like I can in the Designer, and because they don’t have a full picture of unpublished changes (I noticed that not all of my changes made in the Designer show up in the Unpublished Changes list in the Editor), we have to assume that they cannot tell if they are OK to publish the whole site. So, I’ve instructed those working in the Editor not to publish the whole site. They need to have me publish the site for them.
I’ve also let them know that while editing live pages, unless they are making simple quick changes, they need to take measures to prevent their work in progress from being published. My advice was to make a duplicate of those pages and work on them while saved in Draft (in the case of Static pages, they’ll need me to make the duplicate for them) where they can use a read-only link to share the page for reviews/approvals and take all the time they need before publishing the pages.
The problem with this method is that there is no simple way (that I see) of switching from the new version of a page to the old version—any links to the original version page will want to stay linked to it even when the name/slugs of the two versions are changed. And it appears that 301 redirects are automatically created in this process. So, I would have to manually copy the changes from the new version page to the old when they are ready to publish.
I feel like I’m missing something here—I’d love to hear how you all work through the process of multiple people working on the site.