Memberstack vs. Webflow CMS Item for Member Profile
Hi, my members can create and should be able to edit their own profiles.
Upon signup, I collect first and last names, company name, and create a custom slug for their profile.
When their profile page is created (Webflow CMS Item), new members can update their profile with an image upload, their "about", location, linkedin link, phone number, and etc.
From your experience, what are some advantages and disadvantages to using Memberstack as your profile db compared to using a Webflow CMS item?
Using Zapier.
Comments
7 comments
Off the top of my head:
Membertack:
Webflow CMS Item:
Webflow has a max limit of CMS items of 10,000.
Creating a CMS item for each member could become problematic if you have a larger audience. We use Memberstack metadata exclusively for any data related to a member.
We are at about 1k CMS items currently and the website is already getting very slow to publish out.
I'd strongly recommend using Memberstack over Webflow. I've tried both on projects in the past, and have lived through the nightmare that is incorrect syncing due to Zapier erroring/glitching. Due to the lag that sometimes happens with Zapier changing Webflow stuff, some users submit changes 5 times because they don't see it changing instantly. Memberstack does.
I'd recommend building a custom profile page in Webflow with all the forms needed to modify their profile info, and simply map that to Memberstack using the ms-data-members attributes. That way you can use Memberstack as your Single Source of Truth. Then create a Zap (or Integromat) to trigger on the Memberstack Update Profile webhook, and carry any changes through to their Webflow CMS Item. Remember, you'll need to store their Webflow CMS ID in Memberstack upon signup for this to work correctly, and you may need to build a lookup step to find their ID prior to the Webflow step.
My rule of thumb is anything that CAN be stored in Memberstack should be stored in Memberstack. So we're talking all text values including URLs and Uploadcare image URLs.
Anything else should pull from Webflow's CMS (Checkbox, Radio Button, Multi-Ref stuff etc etc).
Just looked up Uploadcare. Looks amazing. I've been using the file uploader through business hosting. What are your thoughts between the two?
How does the UX look on the member side? If you have a page that's pulling from two independent sources that could be updated separately? Multiple "Save" buttons? I can see how it would work on images, but I'm specifically asking about radio buttons and checkboxes.
I wouldn't bother with the Webflow uploader. Seriously expensive and really only fit for purpose for uploading documents (PDFs, Word docs etc).
For proper profile picture support, you'll need to use Uploadcare to do autocropping and autoresize (400px x 400px for example). Works amazingly well with Memberstack & Webflow, even hosts the images for you.
And yes correct, multiple save buttons. One for Memberstack, and then one for a Webflow form. In previous jobs I've split these out into 'Sections' of a profile, ie. Basic, Location, Links etc each with their own Save button. Another reason to try and keep it all within Memberstack if you can, because one Save button does the trick for everything.
Agree with Hugh's thoughts here. On top of all of this, the member pages using Memberstack are inherently more secure. Using Webflow CMS simply hides the pages which CAN be circumvented if someone knows what they're doing. Using MS as the database means the best someone who want to be malicious can do is load the Webflow page with a bunch of placeholders. We use the MS DB for our site - https://business.openly.com.au and it is brilliant.
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