I understand how to use the CMS but am not experienced in more advanced dealings. Basically, on my Blog List Page, I want to have rows representing each different category (CMS Collection 1) and inside of that category section have 1 featured Blog Post Title & Summary (CMS Collection 2) in that category section. Here is a Figma design of what I am wanting to create.
I’m having a hard time getting this to work correctly in Webflow. I’m running into an issue when I create a collection list for the categories and try to add the article, I’m struggling to figure out how to link the 2 and filter them onto this blog post page.
I have a collection list for the Blog Posts and Categories.
I have a featured switch in each one of the Blog Posts.
Hopefully, this context was helpful. Thank you for the assistance in advanced.
Hi Paul, welcome to the forum.
There are two approaches for nesting lists here;
MULTI-REF FIELD
I personally don’t recommend this one at all, but, some like it.
You can add a multi-ref field in your Categories table that links to the Blog Posts in it.
Advantage - you can use Webflow’s nested Collection Lists feature directly
Disadvantages - you’re limited to 5 nested items, you cannot sort or filter them, and multiref fields are difficult to manage in the CMS admin console.
SCRIPT-SOLUTION
Generate your Categories list and your Post list separately, and use script to reorganize them up on screen. I do this a lot for clients, so message if you’d like help building it.
Advantage - easy administration, can do more than 100 nested items on the page, can sort how you like, works with dynamic filtering.
Disadvantage - requires some code, or a 3rd party toolset.
Have a look at Finsweet’s CMS Nest feature as well, you may be able to make that work well for what you’re doing.
Thank you for your response on this. So if I were to go the multi-ref field route, the person writing the blogs would essentially have to use the multi-ref field to kind of manually select the blog that has that same category?
In nested collection lists, the nesting has to be a parent-to-child multi-ref relationship.
Your user would-
Write the article in Blogs
Go to Collections, find the collection
Add the blog to the end of the multiref field
Webflow multiref fields don’t allow re-ordering, so if you wanted it at the top, you’d have to delete all of the items and re-add them.
As I recall, you also can’t sort nested collection lists, so your item goes at the end of the nested list, and then after 5 they’re just truncated.
Your best best with things like this is to create a simple blank site, throw some data in, and mock it up. It’s important to know the details and ins and outs of each feature first-hand so you can make the right decision for your use case.
If I’m understanding your ask correctly, it’s doable.
Here’s an interesting (high-level) walk through of how a complex blog can be setup with Webflow talking about their approach (along with other things) to solving the “featured site” switch:
It looks like all the parts & pieces are available to you (if I’m understanding your correctly), just spend a bit of time reading through these resources and I believe you’ll be in a good spot.
welcome to the forum.