I’m making a portfolio using a Collection and I want to use a Collection Template but customize some of the projects by adding things or even just changing the background color. Who uses the exact same layout on every single portfolio page? That’s just boring. And not very functional, if like me you want to display a custom Case Study for each client’s very different problems and solutions.
Why can’t I just add a sub-class to a collection template so that only that individual page is affected?
Seems like people have been asking for this for years. I’ve searched numerous terms and looked all through the Forum but it looks like there’s still no easy way to do this.
This solution (from 2015) may be promising but @thesergie uses so much jargon in his answer I’m not sure if it does what I’m looking for (I’m not sure what it does at all — what are “dynamic list ranges”?): Customise a template - #5
I know this is on the Wishlist and I’ve voted for it, but it’s disheartening that such a basic necessity is more than 3 years in the asking, and we apparently don’t have a fix yet.
I suggested a couple of solutions to another member of the forum a while ago, but I can’t find the thread. Anyway, I’m going to write them down here:
At the end it’ll depend on how many case studies you want to design to be unique.
If you want to design every single one case studies to be unique I’d suggest to not use the CMS for this purpose and create static pages for them and maybe only use the CMS for editing or other things like blogs, etc.
If you want to have a couple of different designs for the same collection I’d suggest to create those designs in the template and wrap everything from the first design option in a div called, let’s say design-wrapper-1 and the second design option design-wrapper-2 and so on and show those designs with conditional visibility activated by a switch in your collection called Design 1 and Design 2 and so on.
I hope this makes sense and helps a bit in your process.
P.S. I’m working on a clonable template to show my second point.
I am totally pissed too! As product designer I want to create custom portfolio, CMS helps to make life easy, but then if you want to make Individual page slightly different and extra features you can not do it. Seriously WEBFLOW? This is like Red flag problem here.
Totally agree, going through it at this very moment. I don’t see how this makes any sense, the objects tied to the CMS should update, and I should be able to manually layout everything else, but nope, it just copies those changes to all the pages.
Totally agree, going through it at this very moment. I don’t see how this makes any sense, the objects tied to the CMS should update, and I should be able to manually layout everything else, but nope, it just copies those changes to all the pages.
Hi @evocarti, the element-field bindings in the CMS do update, I am not exactly sure what your use case, can you help to describe?
Background colors for individual items can be made by creating a color field in the CMS collection, then bind the color field to the background color in the cms collection template page.
The collection pages are templates, you can make all of your items have the same design look, or change those using color fields, conditional visibility and even custom code that uses dynamic field info from CMS to manipulate the page.
If you can help to describe what you are trying to build out, I am happy to help take a look whats possible there.
Hey Dave, thanks for reaching out maybe I worded it weirdly. I’m aware the element-field bindings update per page, that works as expected. I have header image, header color, and header title & subtitle all tied to a collection.
I then created some building blocks; divs with…body text & a quote, body text & an image, a section divider element, and full width image.
The thought was that the parts that were binded would update on each of the pages created for that collection (swapping out the images, and title, etc.), but the building blocks would remain static, and I’d copy paste, and/or delete according to what I needed to layout the rest of a particular page.
However this is not the case. What happens is that whatever you do on page updates all the others. Now you can get around this using conditions, but you have to account for what each my page might or might not need.
It’s incredible that 5 years later this is still not fixed. Specially when Webflow sell themselves as a tool for designers. What designer wants to create all portfolio items identically?
Can you please share the wishlist link for this petition to vote? I haven’t been able to find it.
@t3r - Webflow’s conditional visibility means all the conditional sections and content are still loaded by the browser and yes that is a real limitation. Makes PPC and SEO a non starter when trying to leverage the CMS IMHO.
It’s absolutely a non-starter. Take it from me. I’ve created a site using conditional visibility, exactly the way as described, and when you try to load one of the sections, the site pulls all of the sections. This causes a super slow load speed (from trying to pull all of the assets from the CDN at once), and it also causes the crawlers to crawl all of the sections. Just not a good solution at all.
I’ll try the individual pages, but the drawback is that you lose the functionality of having a CMS to easily organize your invariable content, and there is a limit to the number of pages on a site.