Our Webflow-focused Courses & Lessons are the largest and most popular content area of this site, and we're reaching out to our community while we consider some major redesign changes here.
What we're thinking
Our current structure of Courses and Lessons is difficult to maintain because much of the information we publish doesn't "fit" neatly.
- It requires us to find or create a new Lesson, sometimes just for a handful of important adhoc notes.
- It requires us to find or create a new Course, sometimes for one Lesson only.
- It requires a Lesson progression within the Course, which is also difficult to express. Often the progression feels artificial, which makes it harder for us to maintain and harder for the community to find.
It's also not well aligned to our more modern publishing approaches, where the content is created and organized outside of Webflow and synced to the CMS automatically.
Restructuring
We're thinking of restructuring this into a knowledge base, for greater flexibility.
- Lessons become Articles
- Courses and Chapters are rethought as Topics & Tags. See below for more on this.
- Articles may be typed, so that a few progressive lessons can retain their ToC structure
- Searching is still full-text, still using Webflow's inbuilt site search engine
- Additional searching is focused on Lesson titles and Descriptions on a main KB page
In this restructuring, all /lessons/* and /courses/* paths would still work, but gradually be replaced by e.g. /kb/*
Topics & Tags
This is the most central part of our thinking right now.
Topics are conceptually a master hierarchy of topics. An Article would be attached to one Topic, and implicitly by it's parent Topics as well.
Webflow
Localization
APIs
Designer API
Data API
Components
Code Components
Component Libraries
Extensibility
Webflow Cloud
Reverse Proxies
Webflow Hosting
DNS Configurations Tags are more general and fluid, and will be used where they add to discovery, e.g. our popular #hack and #layout tags,
We'll likely also keep our other Lesson-level attributes, and be able to utilize them more effectively-
- Level, which indicates the level of technical expertise we recommend. This will likely be expanded to support multiple Levels on a single Article
- Status, which indicates our work on a Lesson. Many begin as a dump of notes, and then gradually evolve ( someday ) into a proper article. this helps us track that level of content maturity and completeness.
We want your feedback
While this all looks good in the data diagrams and whiteboarding sessions, we want to make sure this serves the needs of our audience.
Here's the difference;
- Courses & Lessons were designed around the concept of progressive learning. Pick a topic and find all of the juice we have to share on that topic.
- Knowledge Base is designed more around "I need a solution to a specific problem" and it fits the way most of our clients work.
If you have an opinion either way, please use our commenting feature below to share your thoughts.
