How to drive a website properly through AirTable

[Simon_Kincaid]

Hi All,

Hope you are well :slightly_smiling_face:

So, I’m driving a single webpage through AirTable and now the client wants to control the whole through AirTable because it’s really quite good.

I have a few problems and it’s mainly centered around the strength of AirTable being also it’s weakness:

1. It is so easy to update, that it’s also easy to make mistakes without knowing … is there any way to easily show what changes have been made?

2. It’s LIVE data. I am wondering how to make some sort of staging area, where a marketing guy can test out and see changes to the website BEFORE pushing the changes live to the website.

3. I don’t understand how to do the caching because I will easily hit the API limit per second

Has anyone integrated AirTable to their website and fixed these issues i.e. having some sort of staging area, and how to cache the results?

[kuovonne]

How are you integrating your webpage with Airtable?

I’ve built no-code websites using with Airtable + Wordpress + Airpress. The Airpress plugin for Wordpress has some built in support for caching data to workaround the API limit. These are websites where

• most content is static (even if pulled from Airtable)
• content from Airtable is read-only or entered through a form (no updating/deleting existing records)
• user’s don’t expect up-to-the-minute data

As for working with live data and mistakes, umm, yeah. I focus on (1) user training, (2) locking down views/permissions where possible, (3) careful consideration of field types, and (4) documentation, both in terms of field names/descriptions and external documentation.

I’ve also built a website with an Airtable backend before I discovered Airpress. I find Airpress much more fun to work with than trying to roll my own.

[Aron]

Hi Simon,

Another way I’ve found of doing this is syncing Airtable with whatever CMS you’re using for your website. I mainly use Webflow to build websites and manage my content in Airtable so I needed to sync between Airtable and Webflow’s CMS.

I’m no programmer, so I used Parabola to do periodic (daily, weekly, or when I want to) checks on Airtable and push changes to Webflow’s CMS via API. I imagine this would work with any CMS with an API. Here’s a video on how I do it

Echoing what @kuovonne wrote in her post. Whatever system you create you have to ensure that folks are aware of how changes in Airtable will affect the website.

Best
Aron

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