Same slug for multiple CMS collections (with different parent folders)

Design help CMS
1

Hello!

I am trying to create a website with two different types of products – as an example, let’s say cars and bikes.

I want to have product pages like

And I want to have blog posts like

I understand that one CMS collection can only have one slug, so I need 4 collections:

  1. Products (Cars)
  2. Products (Bikes)
  3. Blog Posts (Cars)
  4. Blog Posts (Bikes)

The problem is assigning slugs to these collections.
Both collection 1 and 3 need the slug “cars”, but the URLs in the end will be unique (since it is now possible to nest collection lists in parent folders)

However, the validation seems to ignore the parent folders and won’t let me use the same slug for multiple collections:

image

Is there any solution or workaround for this?
I can’t really change anything about the URL structure since it is a SEO requirement.

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2

Webflow natively won’t support those constructions.
Part of the issue is namespacing. If you want car products and car posts both under /cars/ there isn’t inherently anything to prevent them from conflicting.

  • Product cars/honda-civic
  • Blog cars/honda-civic

So in Webflow world, the closest you can reasonably get is this;

/products - folder
  /cars - folder
    /car-products - collection slug
      /honda-civic - car product collection item
    /car-posts - collection slug
      /honda-civic - car post collection item

Which works, but it just isn’t ideal for SEO.
Admin either, since you now have 4 collections to maintain instead of 2.

More and more, I’m solving this for clients by using a reverse proxy setup and some custom coding to handle the path rules, canonical changes, and sitemap changes. It’s the only way to fully control the paths, without redirects, and to combine multiple collections under the same path.

3

Thank you for your reply!

There wouldn’t actually be any conflicts because the situation wouldn’t be

  • Product cars/honda-civic
  • Blog cars/honda-civic

Instead, it would be

  • Product products/cars/honda-civic
  • Blog blog/cars/honda-civic

But I understand that Webflow simply doesn’t support this at the moment.

I will see if we can change our URL structure in the way you suggested, and if not will have a look at a reverse proxy setup.

Thank you!

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