Webflow User Accounts / Memberships

User Accounts is a long-awaited platform piece in the Webflow ecosystem, which provides some basic membership capabilities to Webflow sites.

Its broad goals were;

• To support user-specific logins.
• To support the organization of users into access-groups that describe what they are permitted to view.
• To gate content securely and allow access only to users with the right access groups
• To provide a membership-based ecommerce solution to Webflow, for content-access subscriptions.

The end result is a system that works ok for simple content-gating and content-subscription services, but which has a number of key limitations. This course will discuss some of those, and what you can do.

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