Chapter configurations within CMS?

Hello all,

I hope you can take the time to quickly help me solve a challenge.

Take a look at the screenshot above. I formatted on Word how I want this to work. Essentially, on the left hand size will be a menu. If you click on the Chapters they expand and there are sub-chapters you can click on. When you click on one of the sub-chapters (or articles), the text on the right hand side should change to display the particular content of that sub-chapter/article. I don’t know how to build this in CMS.

Oh, and as you see in the screenshot, with “Blah 1” that is what is currently selected and displaying the “Lorem ipsum” (the content).

All the help is very much appreciated.

Thank you!


Here is my public share link: LINK
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I don’t think you can do this dynamically as it requires nesting collections. So you would have to have to manually add the chapters and then add collections for the sub content with a filter for the desired parent chapter.

The thing is, I’m not sure the client will be able to manually do the adding. I’d like to make it easier on the client by bringing everything to the CMS. You sure there isn’t a solution for this?

Thank you for responding!

Always hoping to stand corrected on this one, but I do no think there is a solution. Definitely not one that enables easy client updating and dynamic page creation based on the CMS content. Thus the reasons nested collections is one of the top wishlist items. Search nested collections here and in google for some work around ideas. None of them are pretty.

Actually you can do this and wont have to do nest collections. It would be a mess but it can be done.

Anyway to fine tune the menu section? What is this project for? Maybe if given more details as to the final outcome you want to have, I can help with the configuration of CMS.

Happy Designing,
Brandon

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Hi Brandon,

Thank you for replying to me. The section on the left is the menu (not sticky). The Chapter tabs in that menu are collapsable. There will be one rich text element per sub-chapter displayed on the right. When you click on the sub-chapter, the rich text element appears on the right, and if I click into another sub-chapter, it opens the rich text element belonging to it, like changing tabs (best way I can say it). Would it be possible for the person on the CMS to create/remove Chapters, Sub-Chapters and within the Sub-Chapters add the text they wish to add?

Thank you for your help Brandon.

Hi @Andrewe,

The best answer is YES they could. However you would have to configure the menu in a way that it would allow chapters and subchapters to be turned on and off based on the content available.

What you could create is a dropdown system that would house your upper level chapters and then when pressed would provide subchapters if available.

A lot of filtering and masking would be needed, but yes this could be achieved with what Webflow offers natively.

For my own reference, is there is a way a site editor could add a chapter, relevant subchapters and then site would reflect the new content without making changes in the designer?

In short, YES! You as the designer would have to prepare the layout to handle that, but in reality yes this could be done.