Webflow Developer Superpowers Explained

Webflow Conference was held during 9-10^th of November, 2022 in Midway SF, San Francisco. Several hundreds attended the event live while thousands others joined online. The event was successful in building momentum around new updates and rallying in all Webflow communities. 

From seasoned developers to newbies, all participated in several panels that celebrated the past year’s wins, recognized the active contributors, and learned about the latest upgrades. 

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The Significance of Webflow Conference

Webflow has an amazing and thriving community. The conference intended to strengthen the bonds within the community. Moreover, it also created a buzz to bring attention to recent developments around Webflow. Finally, it also led to awareness about Webflow’s role as a no-code development tool. 

The Webflow Conf 2022 was an opportunity for tech junkies and no-code enthusiasts to gather to share their learnings, challenges, and more, in-person or otherwise. The Webflow team and clients showed up on stage to shared the latest developments across 4 directions - Grow, Build, Design, and Collaborate into Webflow’s universe.

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The 4 Superpowers: What are they?

Webflow has unveiled new and exciting features aka Superpowers that can revolutionize the way you look at web development. These superpowers are aimed at different aspects of web development that serve different use cases. This blog covers Developer superpowers that have been already rolled out and the ones that are due. 

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Developer Superpower Explained

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Developers are at the core of the Webflow community. Therefore, Webflow has released several new features that allow developers to work effectively. These superpowers come under four categories pertaining to user interface, data, Ecommerce, and automation. Let's have a look at each one of the following:

UI:

Usability is a primary requirement of modern apps and websites. But, ensuring consistency across design systems or providing unique instances while scaling the site or app has been challenging. Hence, Webflow earlier announced Symbol overrides and nested Symbols, which tackled the challenge partially.

But, the latest upgrade of Symbols to Components has taken this to the next level. Components allow reuse of UI elements. You can edit layout components within the canvas itself. Additionally, it's also possible to define specific properties of each instance that are preserved or modified. For example, altering the headshot and content for each testimonial card of your website while maintaining the structure of the card itself. 

Another noteworthy release was variable fonts. Now, coders and designers can change the weight and style that was fixed as per preset parameters given by the type designer. It will be possible to alter these font properties on a more granular scale with a slider than putting in pre-determined numerical values in upcoming versions. More so, these Open Font variations will now load using a single file, instead of loading multiple font files. 

More so, it will be possible to add Support states, transitions, interactions, for fonts too, based on mouse hover, and so forth.

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Data:

Webflow allows users to make bulk updates using CMS collections. Collections can refer to different content types, for instance, product categories in an Ecommerce store. Now, updating this kind of dynamic content is tedious. 

But, with Webflow you can import CSV files to update dynamic content on any collections, including ecommerce stores, blogs, portfolio websites, etc. Moreover, publishing bulk data will also be achievable with Webflow. You can also link components to dynamic data in Collections pages. Collection pages act as templates, so editing one will propagate changes in all other instances. 

Going forward, Webflow will also provide native support for localization aka multiple-language sites. This was made possible by expanding on the number of CMS Collections, which allows to host more data on a website. The next shipping of this feature will help localize both static and dynamic content.

You can localize items like images, page settings, SEO titles, etc. Developers can also code localization APIs using external translation services. Localization is highly useful for businesses looking to widen their reach and expand their revenue. 

Webflow is the top-rated no-code tool to build Membership sites. Now, with Webflow you can design customized user experience for Membership sites. ‘Users’ is accessible in the UI with Webflow Designer for easy access. You can allow or prohibit access to a certain content based on user status, say their login status or even their subscription tier into a membership portal.

This empowers creators to monetize their content within different strata of community. Furthermore, Membership sites can have up to 20,000 users instead of a previous bar of 300.

Ecommerce:

Ecommerce is one direction where Webflow is seeing significant growth. Around 5.4 million products have been sold using Webflow Ecommerce so far. Hence, Webflow Conf 2022 announced exciting features for Ecommerce businesses too. 

The number of products supported increased in both Ecommerce Plus (from 1000 to 5000) and Ecommerce Advanced (3000 to 15000). Additionally, the item limits for ecommerce items and CMS items will be calculated separately in contrast to the earlier coupled counting.

Logic:

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Webflow Conf highlighted how brands are using Logic to power their web solutions. Logic allows for native automation in Webflow websites and apps. This provision is absent in several other website builders calling for complex coding routines. Logic has been under development for several months now and is in Beta mode and available to anyone who signs up. Logic comprises Trigger, Condition, and Action. 

Logic enables to set a resultant action in motion when a set of preset conditions are fulfilled. Logic empowers developers to build automations seamlessly using different Webflow capabilities like forms, CMS, Users, and so on.

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Why must developers care?

No-code adoption is on the rise. Developers must leverage these existing building blocks to spearhead their development processes. No-code development is the neat and efficient way of coding modern apps, websites, and ecommerce stores. 

Technology is a landscape that changes each day, and it only makes sense to be an early-adopter of a technology on the rise, which also makes your job easier and faster.

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Conclusion

Webflow will ship a lot of updates in the coming months. We want our readers to be the first to get the dips as soon as possible. So, you can continue to check this space for incoming updates. Till then, happy coding folks!!