Hi All – I am wondering if anyone works with freelance writers and may have solved the following issue.
I have started to migrate our news and lifestyle website coming from Wordpress and finding that publishing to the CMS as an individual writer will be an issue since contributors to the editor mean they can edit the whole site. There is no way, that I know of, to granularly give access to a writer to their own posts, or restrict access to a specific collection in any other way. I currently have the Ecommerce Plus plan, which means our team of writers also have access to edit products and such. There are ways to restrict content from being edited through the designer but this also means that it would affect other internal structured roles.
Wordpress has options to assign, for example, Subscriber, Contributor, Editors, and Admin roles. In addition, there are plugins that allow you to create custom roles based on needs. These roles would limit the visibility of the different custom post types (collections) and allow for workflows (like Draft, Pending Review, Published) to be created.
At the moment, we have about 12 writers and thinking that the immediate solution might be to set up and external platform/service of some sort that can plug into Webflow’s API. Some samples are:
GatherContent
CoSchedule
Contenful
Or maybe just even Wordpress and Zapier
There is also the possibility of maybe using MemberStack.io to create the different roles and access pages together with form submissions to maybe create a front end portal for our writers. Trying to figure an easy way to create a proof of concept before going any further.
I am also wondering if anyone knows if Webflow has any near plans to upgrade their CMS to be more robust. I think I read or watch something about how the Webflow CMS lacks such features and may someday improve but no timeline.
Hope all of this makes sense and will continue to post any findings here.
You could also consider coda or airtable for back ends that can be used for a range of business needs as well as content. I think Vlad (CEO) has mentioned editor improvements on the roadmap (would not hold one’s breath). Another option is convert the webflow site to wordpress with udesly.
Wordpress started as a platform for blogging and for its versatility and lack of better options it become the main platform for any kind of website BUT is important to consider that its primary purpose is blogging, for this reason Wordpress works amazing for this type of website.
The way I see Webflow don’t came to substitute Wordpress but to deliver the solution that was missing on the market… I am not very sure about its future plans but I have no intention to migrate my webportal (blog, lifestyle, news, etc) to Webflow, instead all the institutionals websites I have done in Wordpress and the ones to come will be definetely be created here.
I have worked with Airtable before for other projects and know is quite flexible for sure, I am going to look into their API capabilities. I haven’t worked with Coda or Udesly and will explore these options as well. I do love the idea of Udesly but the one drawback for us is having to maintain two hosting plans and platforms.
From what I am understanding, being new to Webflow and all, is that the engineering team is focusing on the E-Commerce component of the platform. Which of course is great. I am hoping, however, that it is at least known and in their plans for improvement.
Thanks, @flpdcz ! I don’t know, I both agree and disagree with you.
I love the Wordpress platform, its flexibility, and community. I have worked with the platform for maybe a decade. Though it can be considered the best platform for blogging/publishing, it is still missing a lot of native components on this topic. It order to complete it, you need various plugins and independent developers working together to make it work. In the end, I find myself working and maintaining 30+ plugins (ie. Required Theme Plugins + CPT Plugin + Visual Designer Plugins + Writer/Permission Plugins + Security Plugins + SEO Plugins + Page Speed Plugins + more) just to make it work as a true CMS platform.
Wordpress core has so much potential and feel some of these could and should be built in. I do want to say, this is what gives live to the community and what makes the platform truly flexible. I also understand not everyone needs these out-of-the-box and for most types of websites simplicity works best.
I can totally see Webflow and its framework be a powerhouse CMS platform, so much so that I feel it has the potential to become a centralize content manager that can be outputted to WebApps, Mobile Apps, Social Media, and other CMS seamlessly.
At the same time, I hope that Wordpress marches forward in the same direction.
Hey @hobokencloud, I’m in a similar situation to you (want to use Webflow as a CMS and scaling content production with a team of writers; finding limitations with the CMS).
Did you end up finding a good app/stack of tools to get the job done?
Hi @cammm – We are currently driving with storychief.io, really easy to integrate with Webflow and includes additional publishing features like SEO tools, Social Sharing, and more. They updated their pricing model recently and it now more accessible.
One thing however that we could not do is centralize our content with the platform. There is no way to import previous content so only new articles can be written on the platform and be pushed to Webflow. Not much of a problem if centralizing is something you are not looking in particular, and given that everything ultimately lives on Webflow this is okay for us right now.
We are also test-driving Ghost and graphCMS and maybe go the headless CMS route so we can work with workflows for other content types.
We ultimately would love to see blogging features grow within Webflow so we are not paying for different subscriptions, working with various vendors, and having one source of truth.
In any case, it is something we are still trying to figure out.
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