How to bulk update Webflow CMS items with Parabola [No Code Tutorial]

in today's video i am going to be going in depth on how to use parabola to bulk update collection items inside of webflow let's get into it hey friends welcome back thanks again for stopping by if you're new to the channel my name is connor i'm the founder of the unicorn factory and i use this channel here to make no code tutorials and to basically show you how you can set up your own no code directories and marketplaces so in today's video i am going to be doing an in-depth tutorial on how you can use parabola to bulk update collection items inside of webflow so for those of you who haven't heard of parabola yet it is a no code automation tool that allows you to bulk update large amounts of data across different platforms so an example of how i use it is the freelancer sync which i have a video about on this channel and what it allows me to do is to basically make sure that my web flow and my ear table database are in sync at any given time you can also connect it to other apis so i also connect it to melee light and to member stack and really the key benefits of using a tool like parabola is that you can always ensure that the information that is being used across different platforms is the same at any given time parabola is however slightly difficult to learn and i get a lot of questions about it so i decided that today i want to show you the most simple flow that you can set up inside of parabola that allows you to update your webflow cms items when you make changes inside of ear table that is probably the use case that is most commonly used when building platforms with the gear table webflow and zapier stack so if this is a brand new tool to you then just following it along step by step will help you get parabola underway but before we get into it i want to quickly tell you about the mvmp coaching program that i'm currently running where i am helping people like yourself set up your own marketplaces and directories using webflow ear table and zapier so i created this coaching and marketplace for people who are thinking about building their own directory or marketplace and ideally want to be in control of the platform themselves so oftentimes people who don't have a technical background are either stuck with hiring developers or going through the process of researching how all of this works now because there's a lot of information out on the internet it can be a bit overwhelming getting started so what i have done is i've taken all my learnings from building the unicorn factory and packaged it up into eight different modules so throughout the coaching you'll learn the basics of how to set up a site inside of webflow you'll learn how airtable databases work and you'll also learn how to automate certain workflows with zapier also depending on what kind of use case your marketplace is i'll also show you how to use tools like member stack to create user accounts or jet boost to do directory filtering and searching so i personally have two main goals for this program number one is to get you to the point where you can start getting customers to sign up to your platform you can start creating profiles for your service providers but more importantly i want to get you to the point where at the end of the sessions that we have done together you are the point where you can continue to build on top of what you already have and add the features using the different noko tools that i show you so besides the eight one on one coaching courses where we jump on a call together and have some chats you will also get access to a course library with a whole bunch of tutorials that you can work on in your own time usually what you'll be able to do is just do that before our one-on-one catch-ups and then we can go over things that you found hard or we can even solve specific use cases that you're going through and then you also get a webflow template that gives you the structure that i'm using for the unicorn factory canada where all you need to do is just jump in there and you can start modifying the template so that you can get your site up and running faster so i just wanted to say straight up front that you don't need to have any technical background on how to use all these different no code tools but i definitely recommend having some sort of expertise or knowledge of the service industry that you want to build the marketplace for so i'm going to be kicking off the next cohort of people joining the program on march 1. so if you are keen to try it out or hear a bit more about it schedule a call with me i'll leave a link in the comments down below and then we can kind of go from there go over the feasibility of your marketplace and see if we're a good fit to work together but without further ado let's just jump into the tutorial this should be something that we'll be going over in the seventh module of the mvnp program and that is how to set up parabola so let's get into it so a very common use case for where parabola can come in super handy is when you need to bulk update cms items so in my case what i want to do here is i want to change the heading and add a subtitle to the service template pages so that it's better for seo and people find it easier to find the site so what i want to do here is i want to change it to be hire the best web designers in ontario and then below that i want to add an h2 i might change that later but you get the point so usually what happens now is i have to just jump in here and then add those custom fields to my cms and then i'll also add one for the hero subtitle and then i'll also add one for the hero title now whenever you create new fields inside of webflow i'd highly recommend jumping over into webflow and creating the equivalent fields inside of that table so in our skills table what we want to do is we want to add a new field for the hero title for the hero subtitle and then also a link for the call to action so there is a quick little hack that i want to show you that will save you a lot of time when it comes to writing the hero titles and the hero subtitles and that is to use formulas to basically pre-populate text and then use these dynamic values here to populate the rest of the title or subtitle so all you need to do is click on customize field type formula and then inside of the speech marks bubbles whatever they're called you just type in what you want your hero text to be so in my case hire the best web designers in ontario now what we want to do is we want this web designers here to be dynamic so the way that you can do it is just close out the speech marks here and then all you need to do is add the and symbol and then what we want to do is add the job title then again we'll add the and symbol and then we will open it up again and now when we're going to have a look at it you can see that it automatically populates the hero title with the text that i have predefined plus the variable of the job title now i can do the same thing with the hero subtitle and yeah you get the idea i'm going to add the hero link later but again the principle here is the same where you just use a formula to basically pre-populate some data for a link and then you don't have to write it out for every single one now one thing that we don't want to do is we don't want to have to go into every single collection item and then manually write out what the hero title is and what the hero subtitle is and that is where tool like parabola comes in super handy so a few things to understand about parabola before we dive into it there are two main concepts that are at play here first of all we are importing tables then we are modifying it inside of parabola and then we are exporting that table to the tool of our choice so we're going to start off by importing the ear table that i just showed you and then we are also going to import the webflow cms and specifically the services table so the way that you do that is you can just type in the app so here we've got a table and then we can also bring in webflow and just be sure that instead of using the send to webflow you use the pull from webflow to pull the data in at the beginning kind of self-explanatory but you know may as well mention it so the next thing you're going to need to do is just authorize it and what you're going to need to do is get your api key and paste it in here you can find the api key for ear table inside of your account page and once you've pasted it in you'll get to this stage here where you now also want to add your base id and your table name so in order to get your base id what you're going to need to do is you're going to need to go to api.eartable.com and in there select the appropriate table that you want to work with so your base id will be in the third paragraph on that first page and all you need to do is just paste it in here once you've pasted that in there you then want to add the table name and that in my case is skills and once you click on the show updated results you'll see everything that is inside of ear table in a table inside of parabola so you can go and check up at the top here to see how many rows you have and that should match how many rows you have inside of that table inside of ear table so now that that's done i just want to go ahead and pull in everything from the webflow cms and basically go through a very similar process you start off by authorizing it and then just selecting the account and then from there you'll be able to pick if you want to see all the collection items sites or collections i just want to see all the collection items for the services table so just jump in there select your page and select your collection and then here again all the information should then automatically be imported and as you'll see now the hero title hero subtitle and hero call to action fields are in there but they are all empty and those are the fields that we want to update now so now that we've got these two tables sitting there we now need to do a little bit of filtering so that we know that we're updating the right fields so the first thing that i typically do is just filter out all of the ear table records that currently are not inside of webflow so the way that i can do that is by adding a row filter so just type in filter rows and drag this over to where the ear table base is now in here what will happen is all of your records will be populated again but now you can apply filters and the filters that i want to apply is to keep the service or skill if the webflow id is populated so i just select webflow id because that is the name of the column here it is is not blank and now when i show updated results you'll see that it goes from 90 rows to 60 because at the moment i only have 60 of those records published inside of webflow so now i pretty much have both types of records the way that i want it and now what we want to do is we want to combine the tables so the way that we can combine the tables is by using what's called a join function so just type in join and they've actually renamed it now to be called combine tables so even easier than it was before so what you want to do now is take the arrow that is connected to the pull from webflow step and just connect it to the combined tables and then what you also want to do is take the arrow from the filter rows step and then connect that to combine tables so i just make sure that the pull from webflow is the primary one you can see if it has the number one just because it makes it easier because we are exporting this step to webflow but in theory they should both be the same anyway so now when we click on the combined table step what we can do is we can set some rules and the main rule that we are looking for is to match them up where they both have the same value and the value that we're looking into here is the webflow item id so inside of webflow the webflow item id is called just id and if you wanted to just double check all you needed to do is just click on the input field one and then just go and see what particular field is populated under that column so i can see this here is a web flow item id so we are all good then what we want to do is we want to then go and see what field has the webflow item id inside of ear table and in our case it's called the webflow id and now if we click show updated results what happens is the webflow table and the ear table both combine into one table so if we just scroll along you can see that now all of the information from inside of ear table is in the same row as all of the information that you get from webflow which means now what used to be two separate records is now one for each service or skill now what we want to do is we now want to take the information that sits inside of ear table for our hero title and our hero subtitle and we want to export that information to webflow so what we do is we search for a web flow step which is called the syn to webflow step so all you need to do drop this in here and you'll see that the arrow from the combined table step automatically connects to send to webflow and then here again you go through the settings and what we want to do here is we want to update existing collection items so once we've done that we also want to pick what particular collection we are looking for which in our case is services and then we also want to specify immediately if we want these items to be in draft mode or live and because we test in production they are always going to be tested in the live version so then first of all what you need to do is you need to basically say to parabola what webflow item id you want to update so they've already pre-populated the item id field for webflow and now what it's doing is it's asking you to pick the appropriate field that you have got in the combined table step inside of parabola so what you can do is you can actually go and click on the import form and see what results you got from the previous step and the field that we are looking for now is the wipro item id so the webflow item id is going to be listed in here as id and you won't be able to find the equivalent airtable version anymore because now you have combined those two into one so you'll just find it as the id so what you want to do now is in parabola just select that field so now you're basically telling them hey the item id that i want to update is this dynamic value so if you want to update the google analytics service you are picking this dynamic value here now what they want us to do is they want us to say what fields we want to update so in our case what we want to update is the hero title we want to update the hero subtitle and we also want to update the ear table item id which i just realized is empty which is a bit naughty always have a backup airtable id inside of webflow and then i also add the hero call to action link and now again here all we need to do is we just now need to say what fields inside of that previous stick do we want to match to whipflow so the hero title is in our case hero title bracket one now this bracket one thing happens when you have the same name inside of webflow and ear tables so in order to differentiate the two what parabola does is it just adds a bracket one behind it so just select that from the drop down i just actually type it in and you'll get your options and the real important part here is to make sure that you pick the right one because if i pick the other hero title it will pick the hero title field from inside of webflow which is currently blank so when you then run the update it will be empty and it won't work next we want the hero subtitle again just match that up the ear table id is called id or lowercase and now the hero call to action button is nowhere to be found and the reason why it's nowhere to be found is because you actually have to have a value inside of ear table otherwise it won't show up in parabola so i'm just going to add a placeholder link for now and then what you're going to have to do is you're going to have to quickly close this click on show updated results and in order for you to now repopulate that field you're going to have to close this window and then click on the refresh or data sources field and then what happens is parabola basically jumps back into air table and web flow and sees if there are any new fields so then if we jump back into this step and select our hero call to action link then we should be able to find our field hero cta link there it is happy days and then all that is left to do is to click on run flow and hope that everything goes well when i just got into parabola i had a lot of error messages come up but since then they've made heaps of improvements and i get way less error messages which is fantastic it usually takes a while for these updates to happen for example with my freelancer sync that takes about 35 minutes to run through so you can actually also schedule it if it's something that you want to do regularly it's not super necessary but um for the unicorn factory new zealand i use my analytics dashboard so i just run it every night at midnight and while we're there we've now seen that the flow has succeeded so now when we jump over into the database and click on the pin and select the fields we can see that they're still empty but that is only because before you see those updates you just need to refresh your browser and once you've refreshed it you can see that all of it is populated including that one rogue link that i called test.com all that's left to do now is to just map your fields now to the cms and that is it job done we have just bulk updated all of our webflow cms items with parabola and now that you've got that set up you can actually just replay it whenever you want so if for example i decided to change my hero subtitle which i definitely will then all i need to do now is jump into parabola hit the run flow button and again it will just go through the motions of pulling in the data from here table pulling in the data from webflow combining them and then exporting them back out to webflow but that my friends is it for today it was a long tutorial but i want to be really detailed about it mostly to show you what these tutorials will be like on the nvmp course so if you are interested again just check out that link down below schedule a call with me let's have a chat about you joining and other than that i hope you've liked and subscribed and have a great rest of the week goodbye

Channel: Connor Finlayson

Views: 1,084

Keywords: webflow, airtable, zapier, parabola, nocode, no code, marketplace, online directory

Id: pmxYZxEI3FI

Length: 17min 51sec (1071 seconds)

Published: Wed Feb 10 2021