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Let's do a quick take on a common problem with the CMS, specifically how to convert a CMS single reference field to an options field. You're probably aware that the CMS has limitations on the number of reference fields you can have. Currently, it’s 5 for the CMS plan and 10 for the business plan. Several CMS capabilities can be extended in the business plan with additional features. In this case, we'll take a reference field—a single reference field—and convert it to an options field. The primary reason to use a reference field is if you have a lot of content in that reference that is relevant, useful, and necessary. However, in our case, an options field will work just fine.
We’re going to take the lesson table in this site, Signal University, and focus on a particular field, the article type field. This field indicates, for example, whether the content type is video or article. It's important to know what these types are, so I’ll quickly notepad them to recreate them in our options field. The four types of content are references, multimedia, video, and article. Double-check your spelling and capitalization to ensure that everything will automatically match during the export and import process. Webflow is strict about this—everything must be correct for it to recognize the options field mapping.
Now, we’ll create a new field in our table—an option field, which I’ll temporarily call "article type 2" as a placeholder. We’ll create options for references, multimedia, video, and article. Again, double-check the spelling and casing to ensure accuracy, as this is crucial for a successful export and import.
Next, we’ll perform the export, making sure to export everything. I’m doing this on Windows, but the process will be similar on a Mac. I’m opening the export in Excel, though I often prefer Google Sheets. The export includes essential fields like the slug, collection ID, and item ID, which are crucial for proper mapping during re-import. This isn't a localized site, but if it were, we’d need to manage localization IDs as well.
Now, looking at the data, we see that the article type information is in lowercase, which matters. We’ll ensure that our options list in the new field matches these lowercase versions. After saving the changes, we’re ready to import. We’ll import the first column as is, without modifying it, since it’s already correctly formatted for the article type.
During the import process, Webflow generally does a good job of matching up fields, but sometimes it converts everything to a draft, which we want to avoid. We’ll update matching and import remaining items as new. Webflow will analyze and present what it thinks is correct, and since we’re importing the same structured file we exported, the CSV should match up easily. We’ll make sure the item ID and other crucial fields are correctly identified.
We’ll skip importing the original "article type" field and instead import its data into our new "article type 2" field. Webflow has identified it as a valid match, so we can proceed. If there were any mismatches, Webflow would prevent the import, which is a helpful feature. We’ll create a backup and begin the import.
After the import, Webflow identified a few items it couldn't import, so we’ll download the import logs for later review. Now, we can see the staged changes, with our new data in the "article type 2" field. Comparing this to the original "article type" field, everything looks correct, with article and video types properly assigned.
There’s still some additional work to unlink any references to the old field before we can remove it, but this is the easiest way I’ve found to free up reference fields that are no longer needed. This process has become easier as Webflow continues to add useful engineering features to the system.
