I find ever since Webflow made the change that you can edit symbols independently of the actual symbol now they are absolutely useless.
I have to manually go in an change links to symbols now on each page. I’m not sure why it’s like this now. It was perfect before and Webflow completely destroyed how symbols work. Anyone else have this issue?
This is super annoying. How do we use symbols the way it used to be now? Is there a trick to it? If this doesn’t work anymore then I"m leaving Webflow. As it is now it’s unusable and I’m so disappointed
I found the recent changes to Symbols hugely beneficial, although I admit that they need to expand on that a bit more. They’ve touched on what’s coming when Symbols turn into “Components” but I haven’t heard any updates on this front for maybe a year or so.
Can you explain a bit more about what your expecting and what issues you’re running into? There is a bit of a learning curve compared to traditional Symbols but, in my opinion, they’ve only gotten more powerful.
Jason, you might be missing this, but when you edit a symbol, in the top right corner is “Edit Master”. This edits the base symbol, the way you’re familiar with.
The new design was a bit weird to get my head around, but it’s honestly fantastic.
Edit master? I don’t see that anywhere.
I don’t understand what they’ve done. What’s the point in making a global element and then not having it be global anymore. I’m expecting to double click on a global element. Make a change and have that change on every instance of that element. You know, how it used to work. I don’t understand what they’ve done here. It’s not clear at all
I found the extremely hidden “edit master” button. But you still can’t just click on a paragraph and edit it. I don’t see any way to edit text at all actually.
edit: I got it, it’s so convoluted and horribly designed now. If you want to edit a paragraph in a component in all instances you need to
Click on the the little gear icon of the component
Click edit all components
Click on the paragraph
ON the right side click on “edit properties”
Edit the text in the little text box instead of on your design like it’s always been
WHO ON EARTH CAME UP WITH THIS??? Went from one step to 5 steps that are all highly unintuitive. This is a step back. If anything you should have to do these extra steps to change a single instance and they should have kept the same normal steps to change all instances. I think 99% of the time when you want to make a change on a component you’ll want global changes not singular ones.
Thanks for letting me know about the edit master part. That saved me. You are amazing!
You can still edit the paragraph content within a Component within the canvas once you’ve clicked inside of it — the field in the Element Settings panel is just another way to do the same thing.
Depending on your workflow, you can access the normal Symbol editing functionality in two ways. The first is clicking on the small edit pencil icon within the on-canvas Component label:
The second is clicking on the Component — or any element nested within it — on the canvas and clicking on the “Edit component” button at the top of either the Style, Element Settings, or Interactions panels:
To mimic the functionality you were used to with Symbols, you can Option/Alt + Double-click on any Component on the canvas to edit the content within without needing to use either of the two methods above.
One thing to note, which may affect how you experience editing Components, is the ability to create overrides for content. If you try and edit content within a Component without first clicking inside of it (to edit it globally) you create an override field. While super useful, they throw a wrench into the prior behavior of editing Symbols and may be what’s causing some confusion.
Elements with overrides are shown with a purple highlight and a “bound element” icon in the Navigator:
They also show up in the Element Settings panel with a blue highlighted label:
Hopefully that helps clarify the process a bit. I’m still getting used to the modified workflow but it makes sense once you get the hang of things 