Signification de la collaboration en tant que fonctionnalité Webflow

At its latest November keynote conference, we were introduced to what was called the “Webflow Superpowers”.

In this article, we will mainly focus on Collaboration "Superpower" and their usage in the Webflow designer!

Webflow collaboration feature introduced

Despite other relevant improvements that have been made over the past few months in this category, the following are the latest updates that were presented to the public:

1. Agency or Freelancer Guest role
2. Site-specific access
3. Page branching

The idea of these updates is to make collaboration with the clients easier, less costly, and less time-consuming.

Agency or Freelancer Guest role in Webflow

The introduction of this Webflow feature is a breakthrough for the clients of Webflow. Earlier, to bring a designer to your workspace you had to either pay for an extra seat on your team, share login credentials with them or transfer the site back and forth, all actions that cost you more be it when it comes to time, security or money. 

Now the latest update allows users to access a client’s Workspace or invite a guest to their own Workspace without having to pay for an extra seat. As long as they have a Workspace account and are subscribed to one of the Workspace plans - Freelancer plan or, Agency plan, be it as an owner, admin or member.

A guest i.e. an Agency or Freelancer will get access to all Workspace sites and folders, they will also have access to the Editor and into Integrations and Template settings, but they cannot access other settings like Workspaces, Members, Plans, Billing, and Partner Settings.

Depending on the type of Workspace subscription there are different abilities at hand regarding site access.If you have a Starter, Core, or Freelancer Workspace plan, you are automatically given a full Site admin role.

But, if you have a Growth, Agency, or Enterprise Workspace plan, you have more accessibility to choosing roles and permissions as follows:

• Site admin
• Can design and publish —Preset guest role on Growth Workspaces 
• Can design
• Can design (limited) — Enterprise-only role

Webflow gives the ability to be a guest or member in up to 100 different Workspaces, but there is a smaller limit to you inviting more guests in the same Workspace. If you have a Starter, Core, Growth, Freelancer, or Agency plan, you can invite up to 2 guests per Workspace, whereas you can invite up to 10 guests in a Workspace if you are an Enterprise Partner.

How to invite a guest on your Webflow Workspace?

To invite a guest you need to go to Workspaces on your Account menu, then go to the Members tab and select Agency or Freelancer guest. 

After that click the invite guest button as seen below:

Then a window will pop up where you need to write the email address of the guest, and after that click on the invite button!

If you mistakenly invite someone, or you want to remove a guest from the Workspace then follow the same steps as above, only this time when you go to Agency or Freelancer guest, there will be the name of the guests you invited, and an option to click the 3 disclosure dots.

Click on the 3 disclosure dots, and a dropdown menu will appear, giving the option to cancel invite if it hasn’t been accepted yet. If the guest is no longer needed, click the disclosure dots and the option Remove from Workspace will appear.

A guest cannot remove himself from the Workspace. 

Keep in mind that if you remove a member of your own Agency of Freelancer Workspace, they will be removed from all other workspaces they were invited to unless they have an Agency or Workspace plan. The same will happen if you cancel or downgrade your Workspace plan!

Site-specific access

While yet unavailable, this feature will start shipping soon on early January 2023. What seems to be an extension of the earlier site-level roles and permissions, this feature will be able to give you even more site control in that regard.

With site-specific access, you can control which sites anyone on your Workspace can access, be it a member of your Workspace, or a guest you invited through guest role. 

Here you will not only be limiting their role, but they will entirely lose access to specific sites of your interest. This is a very important step in decreasing security risks when dealing with sensitive stuff that you don’t want to share with others.

Page branching

A feature available only for Webflow Enterprise customers or Enterprise partners. It provides its users with more flexibility and better time management. Page branching gives teams new opportunities. It allows multiple designers to work together on different pages of the same site at the same time, all because of the ability to work in “isolation”, thus they can build and ship faster.

Here is how this works – a designer starts working on a page while other designers work on other pages, each making the changes of their own without hindering the work of the other.

Then in the end when the necessary changes have been completed, the designer can merge his page branch, which will cause the original page design to get overwritten, and the others will be able to see the changes that you have made.

Note that after you do the merging, the original content of the page that was there before the changes will be lost, with the exception of changes to components, classes, or interactions which will not be lost and cannot be newly created or modified on a page branch.

Anyone with Designer access can create and merge branches. Only one designer at a time can work on a page branch, the moment the first designer leaves the page branch, another designer can enter and continue to make other changes.

How to branch and merge a page?

First go to the Pages panel, select the page you want to branch, and click the “Create page branch” button. 

The page branch will open and you can continue with your work on the Designer. It will show up on the panel with an orange arrow by which you can distinguish it from non-branched pages.

When finishing your work, you can share a read-only link with a team member before you decide to merge it. Finally, after deciding to merge your page branch, there are two ways you can do this:

• Merge the changes from the page branch
• Merge the changes from the Pages panel

For the 1st method, go to the top of the Designer and click on the dropdown arrow where the name of your page branch is, then click Merge with site

The other way is through the Pages Panel, hover over the page branch on the list with the orange arrow, and click the Merge this branch with your site button. Through this same option, you can also delete your page branch or check for updated classes, components, or interactions.

After clicking there will be a warning message that the original content of the page will be lost after you decide to merge the page branch you were working on.

Lastly a pro tip: there is a way to fully restore your original page design even after you have merged the page branch, to learn how to, check this hyperlink.

For more Webflow and designer-related articles, you can check out our blog posts, and to save you time and effort from designing, here you can be introduced to our Webflow templates that our team designed and developed with much care and love, for any user in any industry!