When a year rich in new features is ending, what's best than the CMS Timeline Of Webflow Features to look back on releases?

Important 2020 features and events

Symbols!

When 2020 started, I knew Symbol Content Override was soon to be released, and I suspected it would be a huge feature. I preemptively named the year "Oh my Symbols!".

Symbol Content Override was released in March, and Nesting Symbols in December. Those are the only 2 features I labeled as "Major" this year. Together, they make Symbols very powerful, giving you the ability to create entire systems that are fast to build and to maintain. Planning ahead can now save you a ton of time down the road.

Since Webflow World Tour this summer we know that Symbols are meant to be renamed Components soon, so they'll get more love and features but it's unclear which ones at this time.

Prebuilt Layouts

The only new feature I labeled "Remarkable" in 2020. It's full of potential. However, it didn't evolve since its introduction last February. I know what you're thinking: "Why can't I save my own Layouts components?" and "With Symbols and Content Override, why do Prebuilt Layouts even exist?" We will certainly get answers to those questions next year.

University 2.0

University 2.0 launch was a very welcomed revamping of the help center. The design of the new center is beautiful, and new lessons are added every week.

Webflow Virtual World Tour

WVWT has been a great way to get a sneak peek inside of Webflow development team. Handled by product managers as speakers, we pretty much got the roadmap of new features from the summer to where we are now. Join Gaby Izzara and Barret Johnson for the opening keynote below, and you can also re-watch all the sessions from the Virtual World Tour website.

Webflow Enterprise

The Webflow Experts program became the Enterprise Program in December, and now propose two listings of curated Webflow developers: Professional Partners are freelance designers ready to build your site from A to Z, Enterprise Partners are agencies capable of handling your most demanding projects. (I belong to this program! You can find me here).

Let's not forget..…

We also got great new design tools this year, such as Image Fit and position support — This, along with Audit, a11y elements, and Batch alt tags, is giving us a great toolbox to improve the accessibility of our websites. Also, Background clipping means a lot less custom code for our images and text clipping effects.

E-commerce is steadily gaining new features too, with Shippo and Printful integration, Digital Goods, Buy Now button, EC discounts, Product types. This should continue next year.

Assets got a lot of love, they now have a larger panel, batch management, and folders! You can also clean unused assets, by deleting all your assets at once, publishing your site, and refreshing the Designer: you'll be left with only assets used by your site.

Speaking of cleaning a project, since this year you can also clean unused interactions, which is a very welcomed feature, useful for maintenance or when you duplicate a project or buy a template.

What is announced for 2021?

From the World Tour Keynote, we know that more features for Symbols are coming: they'll be renamed Components, they'll get a Style override/variants feature — I also hope we'll get a feature to turn on and off the display of elements of a Symbol that are turned into fields. Webflow is also working on sharing components across projects and a notion of Component page building, which would allow some sort of disconnection between a component and the page styles.

One of the most exciting things that Webflow disclosed working on is Workflows. How many of your sites are using automation from Integromat, Zapier, or another third party service? What if those automations were handled by Webflow directly?

Webflow is also working on User Accounts and Subscriptions for e-commerce. Those two features are among the most requested. User Accounts alone should help decide a lot of clients to jump into Webflow for their e-commerce.

A better Team experience is also in the works. The Team plan is currently difficult to understand and often judged too expensive. Also, it is difficult to collaborate between designers or designers and clients when you don't have a team Plan, pushing you to share credentials or to purchase an Account plan just to transfer a site. We hope 2021 will bring clarity and efficiency to collaboration, with notions of roles and feedback too.

The Timeline is now up to date, reflecting the possible upcoming features for 2021.

My wish for 2021? That we see an end to the current sanitary crisis, and that conferences and meetups can happen again. We should expect a No-Code conference, one way or another.

Have a great 2021 everyone, it's going to be exciting!