Is it possible to push new CMS entries to prod without pushing other changes elsewhere on the site at the same time?
I had this issue with Framer where we were working on some larger changes to the design of a page on our site but we wanted to continue publishing content on the blog in the meantime. Unfortunately we couldn’t publish any blog posts until we were ready to ship the rest of the changes to the site since it wasn’t possible to push changes to prod in isolation.
I’ve never done a study of how the publishing system handles CMS changes v. designer changes, but Webflow definitely has some anomalies here like Framer, which it looks like the Webflow team has been working to address behind the scenes.
PUBLISHING VIA THE API
This is likely the most reliable and may give you the best results. Push an update into the CMS via the API, and then make a second API call to publish it. I don’t think that would pick up any of the designer changes.
However if the CMS schema is inconsistent between staging and production, the API call might fail. For example;
You have a blog
In Staging, you add an “Author” field, but you do not publish the changes to production
Then through the API, you push a new item, containing an Author field
Webflow will try to create the record in both the staging and production db’s, but it can’t
PUBLISHING VIA THE DESIGNER
When you edit or update a blog entry, there’s an option under the Save button to publish it now. I’d expect that to work similarly to a direct API call, and to error if the schemas our out of sync.
PUBLISHING VIA THE EDITOR
The built-in WYSIWYG editor is fantastic, and a key part of the infrastructure for most Webflow clients, but it’s also a slightly simpler and older tool. There have been reports that a client publishing an update on Page X would sometimes cause the entire site to publish, including unfinished pages. I don’t know the current situation there.
I’d probably mockup and test your specific scenario to be certain you can predict how it will behave.
Even so, the best practice from your part is probably to isolate your design changes by marking unfinished pages as draft, or placing them inside of a password-protected folder, so that they do not impact the visible site or SEO until you want them to - even if the full site is published.