Webflow + backend code

Publishing help General
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Can the Webflow team tell a bit about how you are using Webflow to build Webflow?

I am particularly interested in, how you (or anyone else for that matter) use it to do new pages/features and integration to backend.

Really love Webflow, but not sure how far it can go in the creation of a webapp. I quickly found the exporting and exporting and exporting to do design changes a bit annoying. Any thoughts and learnings on this would be appreciated.

Thx
Asser

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This is my struggle as well - once you add backend code to it - you’re kinda stuck with what you got. I do believe however, that will be the case - Webflow is the front end design tool - not sure how they could possibly create it to accommodate backend code - especially considering it’s browser based - I think you’d have this possibility if it were a downloadable application - who knows…

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At the moment, Webflow can’t be used to create an actual webapp from start to finish. Instead, it can be used to create a UI layer that is later wired up by a developer. But you’re right, constantly exporting every time you make a design change can be annoying, and we’re starting to think of ways to eliminate that in the future.

@asssmidt, by “We use Webflow to build Webflow”, I think we only ever said we used Webflow to build Webflow.com (the marketing page), since it’s mostly a static site. So for now, it’s really much better suited to creating websites than it is web apps, but we have some ideas up our sleeve that will make app development easier as well in the near future.

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Hi guys,

Has there been any progress on this front? Would love to use webflow to build the UI components of our webapp, and then wire it up on the backend.

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Just to give you guys feedback on this. I’m having the same problem. I waited a while till my website in Webflow was ‘finished’, then did the PHP templating (ripping pieces apart, header/footer includes, and database support etc). Afterwards my client requested some changes and I had to edit in Webflow and re-exporting up to somewhere like 10 times. I could have done it by hand but prefered Webflow for the responsive features.

Every time I would need to rename my files to _webflow.scss and _mysite.scss, bypassing the annoying OS X dialog everytime (Are you sure you want to change to .csss?). Because I use Sass to put them together (with Codekit as well) to get 1 style.css. I also had to pay attention where I would put dynamic content, as changes to the static version will needed to be copied to the dynamic version as well.

I understand it would be very hard to make Webflow support dynamic content. But if this process can be improved it would be very helpful already. The very challenging design problem would be: How do you make the app workflow so that changes back and forth (between phases design / development) will not be cumbersome.

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