Once you’ve created a Collection, you can go back and edit collection items, fields, and other settings—even after the project has been published.
Note: We're transitioning to Workspaces, and are in the process of updating our content. Visit the blog post to read more about these updates and changes, or visit our updated lesson on how to modify a Collection.
Once a collection has been created, or even down the road once your project has been completed and published, you can go in at any time and make a number of changes to a collection or any of the items inside.
We'll quickly cover modifying collection settings, making changes to individual items inside our collection, and even changing multiple items at once.
Let's do collection settings.
From the CMS, we can go into our collection. From our collection we can access Settings. We can change the name, do all the other stuff you'd expect here. But here's something that's really practical, especially if we're iterating on this while working with collaborators.
We can modify the label on each field — but we can also add or modify the help text to make everything really clear. Or we can re-sort our fields to change the order.
When we're done? We can save.
Let's go in and change collection items. We can do this from the Editor, too, but for now, let's go into our collection root, and click to select a specific item. Modify content? We can do this on each item individually. Just like before, when we're done? We can save.
That's modifying individual items. Finally, let's make changes on multiple items.
This is really practical when we're sorting the content we want displayed or featured in our project...or even in the CMS. We can show or hide our fields here using the pin icon.
We can even go in and select multiple items at once. We can mark these as Draft (maybe they're not ready for primetime). We could go back in and select other items. Of course, we can archive these (pull them from our project but keep them accessible from the CMS in the Designer and the Editor). Or, we can go back in one more time and select a couple of those items we just archived, and unarchive them so they publish again.
Want something more permanent? We can select a few of these and delete. Or, if you've just had it and want to start from scratch? Or maybe you've been using dummy content and you're ready to start with real content? You can delete everything.
So. We can go in at any time and modify our collection settings, we can change content for individual items, and we can select and modify multiple items at once.
Once you’ve created a Collection, you can go back and edit Collection items, fields, and other settings — even after the project has been published.
In this lesson you’ll learn:
To access the Collection settings, open a Collection in the CMS and click on Settings. You can also click on the settings icon next to the Collection in the Collection Panel.
The singular and plural versions of the collection name can be edited at any time after a Collection has been created.
You can add, edit, or remove any fields in your Collection. In each field you can modify the label and help text. Customizing the help text can make it clear to Collaborators what each field is intended for.
Learn more about Collection Fields.
The connections manager in a Collection's settings allows you to see where a Collection Field is connected to in your designs. To access the connection manager, open the Collection settings, scroll all the way down, and click the button labeled "view connections".
Here, you can:
Once you remove a connection from an element, the element falls back to the default content associated with that element. For example, a paragraph will show the default placeholder text for the paragraph element.
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, bulk-editing Collection items can be a lifesaver. You can filter, sort, or search your content to determine what to edit.
With a Collection open, select the pin icon in the top right corner of the list to show or hide fields in the Collection. Depending on the field type you’re sorting, you click on the column heading to sort alphabetically, numerically, by date, or by true/false values.
You can also use the “filter” button to refine the items that are visible, based on their status, published date, created date, and modified date.
Using the search bar is another quick way to find exactly what you want to edit.
Learn more about filter, sort, and search.
To edit multiple items, click the Select button in the top action bar to activate bulk editing.
Select items (SHIFT + click to select a range of items) and perform any of these bulk actions:
Learn more about bulk-editing Collection items.
If you want to update multiple Collection items’ data, you can selectively export just the individual Collection items you need to update:
After you’ve made your changes and have saved your CSV file, you can re-import just the updated, individual Collection items into your collection, and can overwrite old content with your new updates. Learn more about importing Collection items.
You can delete a Collection when you don’t need it anymore. This will also delete the Collection template page from your site.
To delete an entire collection, you’ll need to complete 3 steps. Let’s walk through each of them:
You’ll need to first delete all Collection items from the Collection:
You’ll need to first remove connections to the Collection and its Fields (e.g., you’ll be disconnecting children elements from their parent element — the Collection). You’ve got 2 different ways to do this.
If you want to keep all your Collection lists and the designs within them on any of your pages where they exist (except for that Collection’s template page which will be deleted):
If you want to remove all the designs in Collection lists on all pages:
Repeat steps 4 and 5 until all Collection lists and elements have been removed and disconnected. (You can also follow these same steps to delete any remaining linked elements in a Collection template page.)
After you have removed all connections to Collection lists and their Fields, you can delete all Collection items from the collection:
After you’ve deleted all the Collection items from your Collection, you can delete the Collection itself:
You can delete all CMS Collections from your site to unlock Basic Hosting for that site.
To remove all CMS from your site, delete each and every Collection in your site following the 3 steps to delete a Collection above.
Additionally, if you have any Collaborators added to your site, you’ll need to remove them before you can switch to a Basic site plan.
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