🎉 Webflow new updates · Webflow Conf 2023 · The Bunker #58

The day has come. Yesterday was the Webflow Conf 2023 in San Francisco. Honestly, good event.

Last year when I watched the conference, they were just discovering the community and people of Webflow, and any face I could see kind of went unnoticed, to be honest.

Yesterday was different, because after a year of hard work with Webflow, and getting to know a large part of the community, I saw the event with different eyes.

When you're not very involved in things, these kinds of events might go unnoticed. But when you know the people and then see them presenting and you say, “oh, I met this person in person”, or “look at our colleague Jose, who appears on the screen”.

Regarding the event: It was interesting, they announced new things and especially things that we needed.

When we look at these kinds of events you think, are they really to improve the product, or are they to impress investors? Well, this depends on the relevance of what they publish.

In my opinion, there were things that we saw yesterday that could have been dispensable, and other things that were not announced.

For now, I won't entirely distract from the event, because there are 4 events in total spread throughout the month (San Francisco, Chicago, New York, and London) and until the month ends and I see everything they have presented, I won't be able to say whether everything they have published is really useful for Webflow users.

Yesterday they announced a rebranding, they adapted Webflow's design. I liked it! The old one had a lot of personality, so the change was delicate. However, the Webflow branding team has done an incredible job and improved the current design.

For now, I'm eager to see what else they announce, because there are things that really need to be incorporated. Like for example being able to select with command or control several layers at once and apply settings to all selected layers at once.

Things they announced:

1. Native integration with Spline. It was clear that they would do something focused on 3D, but I did not expect direct integration. Now from the interaction panel, you can configure even the lights in the 3D scene. Now making projects with wow-effect and 3D incorporations will be much easier, whereas before you could have done it with ThreeJs. Because we are not talking about animations on scroll, which in the end is a playback of the video on scroll, but we are talking about direct interaction with the 3D element with the mouse doing hover, for example.
2. Update of the branding and the entire interface. I'm very excited to finally see Joey Banks contributions to this project. (You can check out his Newsletter, highly recommended).
3. Introduction of variables. Same operation as in Figma, and this is game-changing. When you work on a single project it is not so serious, because you can more or less remember what you have been doing and why. But for example, I work with templates, all templates start from the same framework, and even though they have different designs, the setup and style settings, custom code, etc... is different. It's adjusted to my needs, to what I need for each project, and I like that everything follows the same pattern. Until now, with basic documentation in Notion, I managed, but having documentation in variables is much better because now I don't have to think "the paddings were 32px, or I have to add the “section-wrapper” class which gives me the paddings". Now just adding the “side-paddings” variable in the paddings is enough. As I say, a major update on a large scale. This will also make making a dark mode a thousand times easier because before it was a headache because you had to go layer by layer, now you only apply values in the variants and that's it.
4. Localization: Finally, we can make a website in Spanish and English (for example). It could be done before, but with Weglot for example, 3rd party applications. Now everything is integrated natively and even with a connection in CMS. And something that is appreciated is that they have thought of an "auto-language", with a single click you can translate the entire page by selecting the body. Brutal.
5. Improvements in the Figma to Webflow plugin. Not bad, now you can copy components and even the variables. It is truly appreciated, small improvements that save lifetime in doing certain tasks that can be easily delegated are very much appreciated. Especially if it saves me time.
6. Component slots. More configuration, more flexibility, and more control over the components. It's important that the more things are synchronized with each other in the project, the better, and improvements to make this happen are appreciated. Until now most things were synchronized by components, but for some reason or another, there were times when you had to break the component and keep two similar components, but without being able to be linked.

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As I say, there are still 3 more events to come, and we'll see what surprises they bring us. And above all, more than Webflow itself, I'm eager to see what surprises integrations, or companies that work on top of the Webflow layer: Relume, Finsweet, Memberstack, etc etc.

That's all for now, we will see what else they are announcing.

What did I expect from the event?

1. Content generation with AI. Just like you can translate the whole website by selecting the body, I expected to be able to generate all the content for the website in the same way. It's true that a project for a client is not ideal, in fact, the text is something super important and strategic. But for those of us who make templates, the content is important but not so much. In the end, we use placeholders to tell the user "your content would go here". And generating that content for templates, by hand, is always a bit mechanical.
2. Selecting multiple layers with control, command, or shift and applying configuration to the selected layers at the same time.
3. Better management with images, being able to export more than one within the canvas at a time

And you, what did you think? Did you like it? Did you get anything right? I'll read your comments!