Is it possible to display data from an external database, such as Airtable, on a Webflow page? I am looking for a solution where Webflow acts as the front-end only and retrieves and displays data from a separate database. Additionally, if I have a blog page that displays articles from the external database, is it possible to have unique URLs for each article, even though the data is not from Webflow CMS? Why or why not?
Yes, it is possible to display data from an external database, such as Airtable, on a Webflow page. Webflow has a feature called API integration, which allows you to pull data from external sources and display it on your site.
To accomplish this, you would need to set up the API integration with Airtable. Airtable provides a RESTful API that you can use to retrieve data from your tables. You would need to obtain an API key and construct the appropriate API request to get the data you want.
Once you have the API integration set up, you can use Webflow's custom code feature to make API requests and retrieve the data. You can then dynamically populate your Webflow page with the data from Airtable. This can be done using JavaScript and AJAX to fetch the data asynchronously and inject it into the page.
Regarding your question about having unique URLs for each article, even though the data is not from Webflow CMS, it is indeed possible. Webflow allows you to create dynamic lists and set up dynamic item pages. With dynamic item pages, you can create a template for your article pages and populate them with data from the external database.
To achieve this, you would need to create a collection in Webflow and configure it to use external content. This allows you to define a URL structure for your articles and populate the pages with data from Airtable using the API integration. Each article can have a unique URL, and when a visitor accesses that URL, the corresponding data will be fetched from Airtable and displayed on the page.
In summary, by leveraging Webflow's API integration and custom code capabilities, you can retrieve data from an external database like Airtable and display it on your Webflow site. You can also create unique URLs for each article by using dynamic item pages and populating them with data from the external database.