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Collection items are database records in a Collection, like a single blog post, an author, or a product.
Collection items are the individual data records in each collection. A Collection item can be a single blog post, an author, a product, and so on. Each Collection item can have values for all or some of the Collection fields that constitute the structure of that Collection. These values can be connected to your design elements and settings to populate them dynamically. Even though each Collection item will have an automatically generated dynamic collection page, it can also be featured in Collection lists on any of your pages.
In this lesson, you’ll learn:
Once you’ve created a Collection, you can choose to add sample content so you can start designing quickly, or you can create items manually, import items from a CSV file, or import them through the CMS API using Zapier or webhooks.
When there are no items in a Collection, you have the option to generate some sample content. Sample content allows you to start designing and building inside the site right away, even if you don’t already have the actual content.
You can start creating items manually by opening the CMS panel or the Ecommerce panel, selecting a Collection and clicking the + New Item button. The button is named after your Collection (e.g., New Blog Post, New Recipe, New Team Member, etc.)
When you create a new CMS item, you can choose to:
If you already have the content structured in a CSV file, you can easily import it into your Collection and map it to existing fields or new fields.
To use the API and tools like Zapier, check out the following resources:
You can update Collection items whenever you want to right from the Designer or the Editor. When you’re updating an existing item, you can save the changes to go live at the next site-wide publish (its status becomes “Staged changes”), publish the item right away to push the content changes to your site (its status becomes “Published”), or unpublish the item to immediately remove it from the live site (its status becomes “Draft” and no longer contains a “Published” timestamp). You can also save it as a draft or cancel to discard the changes.
You can edit draft items as many times as you need and keep choosing to save them as a draft until you’re ready to publish them. Once ready, the item can be staged for publish or published instantly to your site. You can also choose to unpublish the item immediately from your live site, while maintaining the item’s draft status.
If you want to unpublish a previously published item, you can choose from 2 options:
If you’d prefer to unpublish multiple items at once, check out our information on bulk-editing.
Unpublishing an item immediately removes the item from the live site, and changes its status to draft (or maintains the draft status if the item was already a draft that was still published to the live site). Unpublishing also removes the original published date.
Saving an item as a draft changes the item’s status to draft, but allows the item to remain published on the live site until the next site-wide publish. Its original published date will also still appear. At the next site-wide publish, the item will be unpublished and removed from the live site, and its original published date will be removed. Its draft status will remain unchanged.
In some cases, publishing individual items would break your site. In these instances, we prevent you from being able to publish single item updates. These instances include:
In each of these situations, the fix is simple: publish your entire site (to all domains) to make sure everything’s in sync.
A Collection is a living, breathing database — it’s constantly growing as you add more items to your collection. You can make changes to existing Collection items or create new ones at any time in the Designer or the Editor.
If you work with a large database of content, managing your Collection items can be a lifesaver when determining what to edit. You can do this by:
Once you open a Collection from the CMS panel in the Designer, your first 100 collection items will be preloaded and visible. If your Collection has more than 100 items, you can page through the additional items using the “Next” and “Previous” pagination buttons at the bottom right of the Designer. Even with item pagination in place, you can still search for any item in the open Collection using the search bar, too!
If you’d like to see more Collection fields than what are displayed by default, open your Collection and select the “pin” icon in the top right corner of the Designer to show or hide fields in the Collection.
Open a Collection and type in the search bar to quickly find exactly what you want to edit. Your search will display any items with matching values in the Name field.
Once you add items to your Collection, use the “filter” button to refine the items that are visible. You can choose from the following filter options:
To apply a filter to your Collection:
If your Collection doesn’t contain items that meet the conditions of the filter combination you have applied, you will see a message in your Collection that states “No results matched your filter options.”
To quickly determine whether a filter is applied to your Collection, check the filter icon itself. If filter options are applied to your Collection, a small checkmark icon appears over the top of the filter.
To reset the filter back to its default state and show all items in a Collection:
After you’ve added items to a Collection, you can also sort the items depending on which fields are present within your Collection. Different fields support different types of sorting:
You can also see the sort type for each sortable field by clicking the title of the field, and hovering over that title to reveal the sort type.
This sort type is based on the comparison of values for each individual item. The fields that use this type of sorting are:
This sort type is based on whether the item’s field contains a value or whether it’s empty. After the field has been sorted by the presence of value, the fields with a “present” value are then sorted alphabetically. The fields that use this type of sorting are:
This sort type means the field cannot be sorted. Fields that aren’t sortable include:
After you have sorted or refined the collection items that are visible, you can now edit multiple items:
Once you’ve selected your items, you can perform a variety of bulk actions depending on your selection and the items’ current status (e.g., you may not be able to perform all actions available if your items contain mixed statuses). The first bulk actions are:
Click the “Update items” button to choose from the following actions in the dropdown menu:
Important: Unpublishing is blocked if your site’s domains have different publish dates, or if your site was restored from a backup. You can regain access to unpublishing after you perform a full-site publish that syncs the publish dates of the different domains.
Scheduled publishing lets you prepare content releases in advance and have them pushed live automatically. This feature is only available on Hosted CMS, Business, and Ecommerce Plans. Learn how to use scheduled publishing.
