How to use External API via json with Webflow CMS

maybe @jasondark can make a youtube video on how to make that work

Yea great idea, I’ve been thinking about doing a video on this as there don’t seem to be any examples on line.

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@jasondark That would be most welcome. :raised_hands:

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I’ll be your accountability buddy :smiley:

Yea let me know if you think of a cool API I could use as an example to get data from and put into a Webflow CMS collection. I was thinking maybe the cat api.

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Following! :raised_hands:
I am currently working on a project and have been trying to find some materials regarding this matter (populating Webflow CMS using external API via json).

Did this make any progress? Would love to see how to do this also

@matthewpmunger @jasondark

I’m having the exact same problem and was wondering if you found a solution.
Any info that would point me in the right direction would be very much appreciated.

I’m basically trying to retrieve info from an API and display on a webflow page.

@gvdias @allenwixted I made a quick and dirty example here. You can clone the project here to see how it works in detail.

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This is extremely helpful. Thanks a lot, @jasondark!

Hey Jason! @jasondark The project seems to not be cloneable anymore. Any chance you can make it cloneable? I can really use this for a project I’m working on. Just let me know and thank you!

Hey I gave this project and others to @webdev recently. I think you’re right, it doesn’t seem to be cloneable. Maybe Jeff could take a look?

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@jasondark @Joe_Schnetzler - Project is cloneable again. Missed the switch to enable last go around. Clone away!

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@jasondark @webdev Wow thank you, Jeff! You are amazing. This is going to help me A LOT.

Sorry for replying to a relatively old conversation but thought it’d be better than to start a whole new topic. I was wondering if there has there been any update to integrate this more into the “no code” or “low code” realm? In other words, the ability to bring in external data from an API to the Webflow CMS without writing all the heavy code that seems to have been a solution from @jasondark. Apologies – I’ve been exclusively looking for options in a service somewhere that makes this easy. I cloned the solution here but it appeared like it would take a lot of time to get up to speed on the custom coding. Any threads of ideas greatly appreciated. Basically, I’m trying to create a website that will lists products that will be pulled exclusively from an existing GraphQL API.

If you want to pull data into the CMS then you’ll need to use the Webflow CMS API or a service like Zapier or Integromat.

The example shown in this thread runs on the front end and should not be used to pull data into the CMS as you don’t want to expose your Webflow private key.

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Hi. Did you ever figure this out? I’m trying to connect a project to the Ticketmaster API.

@jasondark Thanks for the tip off. A couple of follow-ups that would love to get your thoughts on:

(1) Is there a link somewhere for how I would access the Webflow CMS API to potentially try do it that way?

(2)I found a great resource on another thread that uses Airtable to update the CMS – is similar to what you are suggesting with Zapier/Integromat? I successfully pulled my product data into Airtable last night (it looks beautiful!) and the tool the other thread talked about looks like it will be great to bring into the CMS.

(3) But, I’m struggling on what direction to take for a user to build a shopping cart. The ecommerce provider we’re working with will actually handle the “checkout” but I struggle to understand what I need to do on our front end build for a user to build a shopping cart and then have that data be sent to the ecommerce provider’s website to complete the order. Is this where I would send the mutations to the GraphQL API directly from the Webflow CMS API somehow?

Perplexed but hopeful,
Justin :slightly_smiling_face:

https://developers.webflow.com/ but you’ll need to be able to write code. Also the Webflow CMS API is pretty bad to work with.

You can use a tool like Zapier to send data from the CMS to Airtable or vice-versa.

The CMS API (or Zapier which uses it) only allows you to access CMS data which isn’t going to help you hit the ecommerce providers endpoint to place the order. This would need to run in a script on the front end (aka the user’s browser) after the page has loaded. Without knowing the details of your project it sounds like you will need a script that sends a user’s order details to an endpoint provided by your ecommerce provider. I have never sent GraphQL mutations from a Webflow site so am not sure what is involved in making that work. I’m sure it’s possible but for something like this it’s likely that using a http endpoint would be simpler to set up.

If you don’t really know what you’re doing then I would suggest working with @foxy as they specialise in Webflow ecommerce integrations and are great to work with.

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@jasondark Thanks for the information. I’ll see if I can find some consulting time/help from your suggestion of Foxy.