I have a webflow site that collects user-written content and publishes it to airtable, which then waits for a moderator to review and approve the content. The content is then published to Webflow at the moderator’s discretion.
Currently I’m using a combination of Make.com, Airtable, NoBull (by finsweet), and webflow
The user fills a form, which via Make publishes to Airtable. Waits for the moderator to approve/edit the content. The moderator then pushes content back to webflow via NoBull.
The Nobull app is ok, but it has some drawbacks: Random COR errors, and it has to publish the entire database in one fell swoop.
Is there a way that I can connect Airtable back to Webflow via MAKE on a post-by-post basis (approving and posting singular posts) rather than having to publish the entire database all at once?
It’s important to note, I am currently on the TEAM plan of Airtable, which (unfortunately) does not allow me access to the premium sync integrations like custom automation scripting in Airtable. So I’m possibly looking for a solution that is primarily driven by MAKE.COM when an action is triggered by airtable.
This may not be possible without the premium sync integrations.
Your insight is greatly appreciated!
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Hello @Dave_Cruickshank,
I’ll just throw this out there, but I don’t know if there is something that would prevent you from implementing in your case.
Add two fields to Airtable, a button/URL and a Checkbox.
The button/URL will lead to a Make Webhook and pass along the recordID().
The checkbox will be an indicator to let you know whether the content was posted to Webflow.
Create a new Make Scenario, triggered by a Webhook.
Airtable module can pull the record information from Airtable, publish to Webflow, then update the Airtable record’s checkbox to indicate the update to Webflow was completed.
This would require the moderator to press that button or visit the URL in order to publish to Webflow. It’s a dynamic URL so it must be done from within Airtable. Do you think that would work for your case?
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So this doesn’t require a specific API call script from Airtable automation? If the button simply launches a URL and puts a recordID, that would probably do it.
I’m just worried that I need to upgrade my Airtable account in order to hook to the Make scenario. It’s a client site, so if I have to do that, I will. I’m (of course) trying to find a clever solution to it.
thanks! Worth a try. I appreciate your time.
@Dave_Cruickshank, here are some more details with some visuals…
Airtable:
The Publish button is disabled because its URL Formula is pointing to Webhook Formula, which is currently blank.
Webhook Formula will show the URL only when Status = Approved and Webflow Updated is still False.
Once Status = Approved, then the Publish button will be enabled, and you can see that the formula has the unique record ID.
Once you click Publish, that will trigger the Make Scenario
The Scenario will then use that Record ID to go and get all the data from the table.
Now that Make has all the data from Airtable, you can pass it to Webflow to publish the content.
If publish was successful, the last module would update the record in Airtable, marking Webflow Updated as True. Marking this true would prevent the Publish button from being used again.
This doesn’t involve any Airtable Extensions or Scripting so can basically be used on any Airtable plan.
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Very cool! Thank you so much!! I can’t wait to give this a shot. Thank you very much.
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So this approach completely worked for me. With a little tweaking. The only annoyance is… when you hit the web-hook, it opens another browser window… but that’s a minor annoyance given the convenience of posting a single CMS item rather than hoisting the entire CMS collection to the website.
The script is a bit convoluted as you have to create branches for NEW article and UPDATING article… plus in each of those you have to create a branch for each of ACTIVE, ARCHIVE, or DRAFT. I even have it pushing status updates back to Airtable throughout the run of the script, and a completed or error message when finished to the Airtable user.
Also, there seems to be a bug in the V2 API that limits the amount of times you can fire the publish module within a minute. They claim that they allow you to do it 5 times per minute, but in my experience, I get “RATE LIMIT HIT” much more often than that. Webflow claims that the PUBLISH ITEM module is all you need to get a CMS item to go live, but when I publish an item with this module, the best I can get is a “staged for publish” status on the item. I have to move forward through to the “PUBLISH SITE” module in order to get it to go live. This isn’t expected behaviour and I have Webflow tech support investigating currently.
But overall, this is a GREAT solution to this problem. Thank you so much for steering me in the right direction. (NOTE: I don’t use the “Webhook formula” table cell… I just put the formula right into the button. Seemed to be a little more efficient that way.
This is my script in a nutshell…
It IS somewhat sad that Finsweet abandoned its Nobull plugin, but in the end, this is a MUCH more convenient and robust solution than Nobull.
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Yes, absolutely, I only did it the way I did to better illustrate the behavior of that field. The point was to disable the button when you don’t want to accidentally use it.
You can also deal with this a couple ways:
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Add a Webhook response module with HTML that will cause the new tab or window to immediately close. Here’s a link to the post with the details: Custom webhook -> how to disable opening new web page with ACCEPTED msg - #11 by Donald_Mitchell
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If you’re on an Airtable plan that allows scripting, use automations to fire a script that calls the Make webhook and nothing will open at all. It’s a few simple lines to fetch a URL. Please see this post (Suppress redirect screen with Airtable "Watch Responses"? - #12 by Ingo) for more details.
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