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Ian Thompson
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Webflow CMS API & collection field slugs

When you create a custom collection field in the Webflow CMS, be aware that the slug created may never change.

I have a list of about 700 products in Airtable that sync over to Webflow with the help of
In my Webflow Collection , I have two reference fields set up to link a Previous and a Next product in the website interface to make it easy for users to scroll along to the next or previous item.
Webflow doesn't have this type of post navigation functionality built in and so, for the time being this is the best way to achieve it. When you have 700 items to deal with that's a lot of tedious work in Webflow to link your reference fields (I'm waiting for Webflow to also add a filter to the reference field drop down that would make life easier too)
Airtable on the other hand makes it really quick and easy to get this job done and then with Parabola on hand it's an easy API exercise to update Webflow with the correct Webflow ID for the referenced fields.
webflow cms slugs 01.jpg
Somewhere along the way though when I made the reference field, I must have swapped the NEXT and PREVIOUS fields over - I think I built out the layout and then realised I had them the wrong way round, so the easiest fix was just swap labels over in the collection settings.
What I didn't realise is that Webflow hangs on to the original slug it creates for the field so my NEXT field had a slug pf 'previous' and my PREVIOUS field had a slug of 'next'. You can see how hours of confused API tweaks, lots of searching on the internet and reading API documentation ensued.
webflow cms slugs 02.jpg
A check on Zapier doesn't yield any give aways as Zapier lists the field by its name, not its slug.
webflow cms slugs 03.jpg
The way I figured it out in the end was quite simple: I created a date field called YEAR, saved the settings, published the site and then realised a simple text field would suffice. So I deleted the date field and then created a plain text field, also called YEAR, saved and published.
Checking the resultant field names in Parabola then showed a field called 'year-2' so I knew Webflow was creating slug names for these fields and forever more, that's what you are stuck with.
Would be good if someone could tell me if there was a way to rename the slug for CMS fields...
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