Webflow User Accounts ( Memberships )

Memberships is a long-awaited platform capability in the Webflow ecosystem, which currently ( Jul-2023 ) is in the process of exiting BETA early with a limited feature set.

Project Status

IMPORTANT: Webflow halted all development on User Accounts around last May and hasn’t added any capabilities since.

The official announcement was in the BETA forums on circle.so originally. Webflow announced they needed to halt development and release the products as-is with no current plans for future development. Those forums were deleted / closed around July/August.

Why was the project halted?

I don’t recall a specific reason given, there were likely several-

• Resources were needed on other projects including core systems development
• Infrastructure changes required for User Accounts and Logic were substantial and were impacting the rest of the system - we were seeing a lot of outages and instabilities
• Meanwhile Localization wasn’t really getting the resourcing it needed and was a higher long term priority
• Attention was being redirected towards a new strategy which is to improve the API, Designer Apps and external Apps integration options so that these types of services could be built by specialist companies like Memberstack.

Summary

Is Webflow Memberships Feb-2024 useful for building a good memberships site?

Basically it's good for a simple content site, where you want to charge for access to specific content areas. You can create "access groups" of different member types like Free, Basic, Pro... and give them access to different things.

However that separation does not work with CMS content, so... you can't e.g. have a CMS courses database and mark some courses as free, some as paid, some as pro-plan...

Overall, the flexibility and styling are decent, but the capabilities are very limited at this point. As of Feb-2024, it's difficult to find professional-site use cases for Webflow's Memberships BETA platform.

Key Points

Notes;

• There are a ton of membership templates in the template store.
• You need an ECommerce plan to sell memberships.

Use cases;

• + Basic membership sign-up, sign-in, sign out
• + Email verification ( required, actually )
• + Controlled content restrictions, by Page
• - SSO logins
• - Complex content separation, by CMS item
• - User dashboards
• - Connection to other systems for member-specific data, e.g. a commenting system, or ordering history. Possible but very difficult and in-secure.

Projects;

• + A simple members-only area, with members-only content
• + A mini intranet of content, which all of the members of a company have access to a members-only area
• - An auction site in which people can log in, watch listings, add listings, remove listings...
• - A tiered-access content site such as courses or articles, where you can control which courses or articles each membership group gets access to
• - A drip-access content site, which offers time-restricted access to content on a per-user basis.
• - A site which manages any special user data such as a dashboard, comments, confidential personal data
• - A site which has any form of user-specific accounts, token tracking, top-up, etc.

Capabilities

It offers some key capabilities;

• The ability to "gate" parts of your site, so that only selected people can access them.
• > Gating Pages, Folders, and Collection Pages ( available now )
• > Gating elements ( coming soon )
• > Gating individual CMS Collection items ( hopefully in the future )
• Membership enrollment options
• > Invitation by email
• > Self-enrollment
• The ability to log-in, and log-out, once enrolled
• The ability to provide for paid memberships

Common Use Cases

• Control access to specific content and screens, to specific users
• Sell access to content, e.g. video courses, articles, downloadable materials... on a monthly subscription basis

Limitations

Important design limitations include;

• User email is required, as is email verification. Whether you invite a user by email, or they enroll on the site, an email address MUST be supplied and they MUST verify it by clicking a link in that received email.
• No OAuth2 support for external providers, e.g. Google
• No admin ability to update or reset passwords

Hopefully-temporary limitations include;

• No ability to manage Users in the Editor
• No ability to view or change a User's access groups through the API
• No password-reminder ability for Users yet
• No ability to gate content to a specific User
• No ability to gate individual CMS Items
• No ability to auto-add a User's email to your newsletter provider when they click "Allow marketing"
• BUG? Clicking "allow marketing" is currently required at enrollment
• Quite a few more, but we're in beta...

More

https://webflow.com/user-accounts

https://university.webflow.com/lesson/webflow-user-accounts-overview