▼
Streaming live at 10am (PST)

Webflow is definately not a blogging platform

Community resources General
#1

I have around 3,500 articles posts and migrated over from WP on the understanding it was a decent blogging platform. Speed and SEO I can’t fault but there are so many flaws that I would recommend anyone think twice about switching to Webflow if you are posting around 10 articles a day. It just isn’t built for it.

My recent challenge is that if I want to go back and edit an article it will then republish it with todays date. This has a knock on affect with the RSS feed as it will appear top in my RSS Mailchimp email newsletter.

This is one of the many flaws it has. Its a great platform for a marketing site but a blogging platform it’s not.

1 Like
#2

@Adam_Foster - Thanks for sharing your experience. I share your sentiments. Unfortunately there is no fixes on the roadmap from what I can tell. I can tell you it is totally possible to convert a WF design back over to WP.

1 Like
#3

Thanks Jeff. I am torn as it is so good in many other ways. My first stumble was the inability to map the publication date fields of both platforms. I would have thought that was standard and didn’t require a custom field. This custom field throws everything out as you have two completely different date fields.

As said I then starting fixing errors (due to the fact that webflow ignored all line breaks in the csv import) but then realised that editing the content essentially made them into new posts for my RSS newsletter.

To me these all seem like logical fixes but I guess its the website of a few pages market that WebFlow serves.

#4

You are not alone @Adam_Foster. I’ve heard these complaints many times.

That’s why I’m currently working on a new tool at PowerImporter.com that will allow people to use Wordpress as a headless CMS to feed Webflow’s CMS with blog posts.

It’s the best of both worlds: you’ll have all the power of Wordpress’ post editor and scheduler, and all the design freedom and SEO benefits of Webflow. And you’ll have a stable RSS feed that doesn’t muck up pubDates when you edit a post.

If you’re interested in joining the private beta, signup here and click the “Request new workflow” button.

#5

Edit: I just re-read more closely and it looks like you’re aware of this solution, but the need for the workaround makes import/export more painful. Only recommendation I could make there would be to rename the field in the CSV you’re importing to match your custom, and then do the import. Granted, still an extra step.

@Adam_Foster I think I might have a workaround for you. This will only impact the publish date for a post; the feed itself will have a publish date equal to whenever you re-published the site.

You can define a custom field for your publish date in the Blog Posts collection (or whatever you call yours :slight_smile: )

image
image1600×1339 213 KB

Then you can configure the RSS feed to use that as a publish date instead:

image
image1882×2006 370 KB

Does that solve your problem? Or did I misunderstand the issue?

1 Like
#6

Thanks so much David. It does seem a good workaround. That said I have made the decision that WebFlow is perfect for many things but it can’t be perfect for everything and that WP is the answer for my needs.

#7

I could write a book about Webflows shortcomings as a blog platform. I’m using Webflow through the Wordpress plugin for Webflow so I can offload older articles to the WP database, and the editor is so poor (by far det worst editor of any blog platform I’ve used) that I’m currently developing an entire publishing / desking solution just for my site.

#8

One has to be careful as to not upset those that have worked so hard on Webflow. Webflow is amazing. It’s by far one of the best platforms around for building sites without code. It truly is above everything else out there. My personal opinion is that Webflow should focus on what it does best and avoid trying to compete with blogging platforms. Wordpress and newcomers such as Craft are all leap years ahead. I will keep my small agency site in Webflow and migrate my publishing platform to Wordpress. Simple.

Keep up the good work Webflow.

2 Likes
#9

The worst part is that Webflow is so nearly there. If they could implement a good blog editor and a few basic blog concepts then they would be unbeatable.

#10

@Adam_Foster I’m considering Webflow for an Medium / Redit / Social mashup app, where it would have more than 10 new “articles” per day. Is your experience saying I should consider other plaforms as Webflow isn’t suitable for this type of application?

#11

Webflow has a max limit of ten thousand “items”, where one “item” in a blog is a blog post, or a tag, or a category. 10 new articles per day means 10 new items per day, which means you’ll be out of room in three years and have to migrate away from Webflow. It is not at all suited for what you want.

However, you can build your static pages in Webflow and export the HTML/CSS to whatever platform you choose.

1 Like