Get started with Rowy in minutes
✨ New - Build APIs, Scheduled Jobs, Backend Workflows! Try out BuildShip ->
Extend the potential of Webflow CMS to unlimited collaborators and powerful content management. With our no-code solution, you can unlock advanced capabilities including direct sync with Airtable.
A content management system (CMS) is a software application that enables users to create, manage, and organize digital content, such as web pages, blog posts, and media files. It provides a range of content management features, allowing users to efficiently publish, update, and organize their content.
A CMS offers numerous benefits, including streamlined content creation workflows, improved collaboration among team members, and the ability to maintain consistency across multiple pages and sections of a website.
Enterprise CMS platforms, like Webflow, provide advanced features and capabilities to meet the needs of large-scale websites and organizations. These platforms offer robust security measures, scalability, and integration options with other enterprise systems.
To illustrate the power of a CMS, let's explore Webflow, a popular CMS platform known for its user-friendly interface and advanced features.
Webflow is a platform that allows you to create and manage websites without needing to write code. It provides a user-friendly interface where you can design and customize your website visually, using drag-and-drop tools. 🏗️
Webflow has a leading CMS platform that empowers users to build and manage websites without coding. It provides a comprehensive set of tools and features to create visually stunning websites and allows you to manage your content effectively.
One of the key components of Webflow is the CMS collection, which serves as a structured database to store and organize your content. You can create different CMS items within a collection to represent various types of content, such as blog posts, products, or events. The CMS collection and items provide the flexibility to structure and present your content in a way that aligns with your requirements.
While Webflow CMS offers many advantages, it's important to be aware of its limitations. Understanding these limitations can help you make informed decisions when building your website. Some of the key limitations include:
To overcome these limitations and unlock additional features, you can consider integrating Webflow CMS with other tools and platforms. One such solution is Rowy, an open-source backend platform that extends the capabilities of Webflow CMS.
While Webflow CMS provides a user-friendly interface, it does have some limitations. The available field types are limited, which means you may not have the flexibility to enter and organize data in the exact format you desire.
Furthermore, if you have data stored in other places, you would need to manually input it into Webflow CMS, which can be time-consuming and tedious.
Webflow CMS also lacks integration with other tools, such as AI services. This means you may miss out on leveraging the power of AI-generated content 🧠 or other advanced capabilities that could enhance your website or application.
In addition, Webflow CMS requires you to subscribe to the CMS Billing plan to invite and grant access to members who need to modify your existing content. This can be a limitation if you want to collaborate with multiple users without incurring extra costs.
On the other hand, Rowy is an open-source backend platform that can greatly enhance your Webflow CMS management. It unlocks 35+ powerful field types, such as Markdown, which allows you to format and display text content more richly. This can be particularly useful for creating blog posts or articles with varied formatting options.
Furthermore, Rowy enables you to integrate AI-generated content seamlessly. This means you can leverage AI services to automate or enhance your content creation process, providing dynamic and personalized experiences to your website visitors.
Another advantage of Rowy is its unlimited users in the free tier. This means you can collaborate with multiple team members or stakeholders without any additional costs, making it ideal for projects that require extensive collaboration and input from various contributors.
Overall, Rowy complements and extends the capabilities of Webflow CMS by providing enhanced field types, integration with AI services, and unlimited user collaboration in the free tier. It empowers you to create more dynamic and customized experiences while simplifying teamwork and reducing potential limitations.
To get started, the first step is to create a Webflow website. There are two options: starting from scratch or utilizing an existing website that already has Webflow CMS integrated. For the purpose of this tutorial, we will take the simpler approach and start from scratch.
To make the process even easier, we can make use of Rowy's blog template available at Rowy's Webflow profile. By cloning this template, we can kickstart our application development with a pre-designed blog layout.
Once we have cloned the template, the next step is to provide a name for our site. This name will help identify our website within the Webflow platform. After entering the desired name, we can proceed by clicking the Create site button.
By following these steps, we can quickly establish a foundation for our application development using Webflow and Rowy's blog template. 🌱
Once this is done, we can move on to the CMS Collections section and take a look at the Blogs CMS. When we move into the settings, we can see the Collections ID and the various Collection fields.
With the website established on Webflow, we are now ready to move to the next phase: connecting it to a table in Rowy. This connection will enable us to manage the content of the website through the table interface provided by Rowy. 🔌
To extract your Webflow API Key, follow these instructions:
To extract your Webflow CMS Collection ID, follow these instructions:
Follow the below-mentioned steps to establish the Webflow CMS template for your application in Rowy:
Once you're all set up with creating your project on Rowy, click on “Show all Templates” under the “Create a Table” section. Choose the Webflow CMS template and let’s get started! 🤩
The Template Setup Wizard will appear. Firstly, you will need to provide the Collection, Table name and Table ID (or use the default ones) and click on Create table.
Once the table has been created, you will need to add your Webflow API Key that we previously retrieved. If you haven't already added it to the GCP Secret Manager, click the Add a key in Secret Manager button.
You will be redirected to the GCP Secret Manager, where you can create a new secret with name webflow and enter the Webflow API token as its value. Once done, navigate back to the Template Setup Wizard and select your key.
For the next step, you will be prompted to enter the Webflow CMS Collection ID that we retrieved previously. Paste the value as input and move on to the next step.
Now, you can deploy the cloud functions required by the project and click on the Proceed button, which will redirect you to the project table.
After successfully completing the setup, we will be redirected to the Webflow CMS table in Rowy that will contain a bunch of columns that are connected to your Webflow’s template. 🚀
➡️ Since we are using the Webflow template, each of the Webflow fields are mapped to the columns in our Rowy table. Further, you can add your own fields as well.
Now that we have successfully set up the Webflow CMS template, we will be able to see our Rowy table with different fields mapped with the fields in Webflow.
The Publish field is an action button that takes several fields to be published as an entry into Webflow CMS. Within the action script, we will need to replace the secret with any custom name that we set for it earlier. We can even change the Collection ID in the script, if required.
TIP💡: Make sure to set the Live toggle on before publishing the entry. It’s just an internal logic that can be changed inside the Publish Column Config.
We can even add more fields in the Rowy Table. Rowy supports over 35 field types that can be mapped to Webflow fields by customizing the action script inside the Publish field.
