In Webflow all CMS data is published either inside of a Collection List, or on a Collection Page. These provide the CMS context for your elements and determine what you can bind your elements and nested collection lists to.
Collection Pages publish a single item in the Collection as a distinct page, They are intended to be the most detailed representation of an individual Collection Item, for example;
- A blog article.
- A real-estate property, with its description, address, map, photos, details, sales history and contact details.
- A restaurant menu dish, with photos, reviews, and related dishes.
- A book, with excerpts, other books by the same author, reviews, stores where you can purchase it.
Limitations
Variability between Collection items
By design, CMS templates work identically across all of the CMS items in that CMS collection.
The only things that vary between to instances of the page are-
- The content of elements that you’ve bound to specific fields
- Certain styling aspects of elements ( e.g. colors ), that you've bound to specific fields
- The visibility or invisibility of specific elements, which you've configured with conditional visibility rules, based on the content of a CMS field
Although those are significant limitations, you can do a lot with those capabilities- but always keep in mind that a template is a template- anything you change will affect all of the item pages generated from it.
WORKAROUND: See the lesson on Creating Variable Layout Options for some techniques on how to increase your layout flexibility with this design limitation.
Path structure
The path structure of Collection Pages is always;
/collection-slug/item-slug
There is no way to exclude a Collection from generating Collection Pages. This means that even a Collection that is used as e.g. a Tags reference, will still generate Collection Pages.
WISHLIST - Allow Collection-Bound Pages Anywhere
SOLUTION: This limitation creates a significant issue for some site designs, particularly when they want semantic paths like /usa/illinois/chicago. To remedy this, Sygnal has created a series of technologies we call Fluid Paths as part of our Hyperflow solution.
