Intro to the Webflow CMS
Use the Webflow CMS to create and manage dynamic content on your site.
A Content Management System (CMS) lets you store and manage dynamic content (i.e., content that changes) with a shared structure.
In this lesson, you’ll learn about:
Dynamic content in the CMS
You’ll start by creating a Collection — a database where you can store and maintain content to reference throughout your site. Each Collection stores a different type of content with a shared structure. For instance, you can create Collections of blog posts, team members, job postings, recipes, etc. Each Collection is comprised of Collection items (e.g., each Collection item in a “Blog posts” Collection would be a single blog post).
When you create a Collection, you decide how to structure each item in that Collection. For example, if you create a Collection of team members, you might want each team member to have a name, photo, and email address. You’ll add a Collection field for each type of content. You can update and delete Collection fields — or the content in Collection fields — at any time. Learn more about using Collection fields to structure Collections.
Once you’ve defined the structure of the items in your Collection, you can start creating Collection items (i.e., an individual piece of content in the Collection). For example, after creating a “Team members” Collection, you can add team members to the Collection. In each Collection item (i.e., each team member), you’ll fill out the Collection fields you defined (e.g., name, photo, email address, etc.).
Pro tip: You can bulk import Collection items via CSV file.
Learn more about creating and structuring Collections.
Dynamic content on your site
Once you’ve structured your Collection and created Collection items, you can reference that dynamic content on your site using:
Collection lists
Collection lists let you reference dynamic Collection content on any site page (including static pages, like your site’s home page). You can show or hide specific Collection items with filters or conditional visibility based on values in the Collection fields, as well as sort the content.
Collection pages
Collection pages are automatically created for every Collection item in your Collection. You can think of a Collection page as a design template for all the items in your Collection — that is, every Collection item in your Collection will use the design you create on the Collection page.
You can add dynamic content to Collection pages by referencing Collection fields. When you edit a Collection page’s design or dynamic references, all Collection pages for items in that Collection automatically update.