Can’t Delete Field from Collection

So I just purchased a template and I’m going through and painstakingly deleting and unlinking dynamic content because all I want to do is have a “Members” collection so the url is .com/members instead of /team-members/…it really sucks that we can’t change the url of a collection once it’s created.

I think I need a dependency refresh or whatever you guys do so I can delete the “author” item in “blog posts”…so I can delete “team members”. woof. Thanks in advance for your help.

https://preview.webflow.com/preview/kindling?preview=7830997272935a3134d27b72d1a05c56

I hate it when something like this happens. I’ll just say that you have to look DEEP. It could be something dynamically included in the page Header/Footer, site Header/Footer (not actually sure if that’s allowed; never tried it), there might also be a subclass over a main class, and so the dynamic part of it is hidden from the subclass. It can also be references from other collections/items, etc. If there is even one reference, you can’t delete it.

Considering it’s a template, it could be anything. Not only that, but once you have removed all elements/classes from elements that involve dynamic information, you need to purge all classes that are UNUSED that involve the dynamic information (unless you disconnected dynamic info from each of those classes).

I’m fairly certain that if you contact Webflow they can help you out if you just absolutely cannot figure it out. And I don’t know if there are any potential consequences of doing this considering it might break something. Who knows…

*update
Yeah I checked out the dynamic page (Team Members Template) and there is dynamic information in all meta tags.

Thanks for your reply @ELiTE . There has to be a better way for this in the future. Webflow can’t assume that people will use templates as is and want to change URL structures. I’ll go through and try finding the dynamic data but chances are Webflow support will have to help me clear them out.

1 Like

Hi @dsgnr it turned out that you had several bindings in your site still for the “Team Members” collection. Some were bound to the content in your collection template page as well as in dynamic lists throughout your site.

Here’s the current work around for removing collections:

  1. Remove all content from the collection template page (including the page settings like meta/OG fields)
  2. Check all dynamic lists that may contain a reference to the collection and then delete those.
  3. Delete all Symbols that contain the Collection reference, or just remove the binding.
  4. Press CMD + S or CTRL + S on Windows to push a dependency refresh after performing those functions.
  5. Then go and delete any references of the collection in other collections
  6. Press CMD + S or CTRL + S on Windows again for the dependency refresh and you should now be able to delete the collection, if you cannot then there is 99.9% of the time a lingering binding somewhere in the site and it could be as small as a sort/filter reference used on a dynamic list.
  7. Of course, always feel free to email me at support@webflow.com and I’ll help you delete the collections :smiley: (I’m here to help)

I’ve already gone ahead and deleted the collection bindings in a duplicate of your site and have transferred that over to you @dsgnr. Thank you so much for your feedback on this feature, we’re working on ways to make the process of removing collections smoother. :bow:

@Waldo you rock!! :smile: thank you for helping me out with this. Hopefully there will be an easier way (for all of us!) in the future.

1 Like

This topic was automatically closed 60 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.