We promised to keep you posted as Source takes shape, so here's the first of those updates: what we've shipped, what we're learning, and what's coming next.
At Webflow Conf in September, we shared the first look at Source by Webflow: a platform for modern marketing teams and agents to harness the web, grow their business, and do their best work together. (The response was incredible, and our inboxes would like a word.)
Since then, Source has been in a limited research preview, with real customers and partners building with it every day. In fact, we just had our first of many "building in public" livestreams for Source, where we'll be showing (not just telling) you what's possible in Source as we develop it. You can check out the recording here.
The View from the research preview
The team working on Source is shipping at a steady rhythm with customers and partners in the research preview getting access to a new milestone release every few weeks. One area we’ve been particularly focused on getting right in these early releases has been the ability to build custom Views inside Source.
For those who missed the deep dive demo at Webflow Conf, Views are a new way that teams can shape Source to match their own ways of working. Out of the box, Source will provide dedicated surfaces for visual site building, content management, optimization, but we also want users to be able to create fully custom Views — so the software adapts to how you work and not the other way around.
From the earliest stages of the research preview, our partners have made one thing very clear: custom Views unlock a lot of value when configuring Source for their clients–but they wanted more power and control when building custom views in the tools they already use.
So we shifted some priorities and moved the Source CLI to the top of our roadmap, giving builders that power and control from the coding tools they already use, and unlocking the first step toward a full Source SDK for custom Views, agents, and integrations.
What we shipped in the latest update
We just shipped the next major milestone in the research preview earlier this week, unlocking some new capabilities and bringing us one step closer to beta:
Frictionless team collaboration in the cloud: Teams in the research preview can now work on the same GitHub-connected codebase in Cloud environments, without needing to set up local dev environments.
Take changes from Source to GitHub and production. Publish changes to the app’s branch on GitHub, then deploy to Webflow Cloud when you’re ready to make them live.
Specialized Agents: We have a new View Builder agent, which is dedicated to helping you create and edit custom Views in Source.
We released Source into research preview with support for Next.JS projects, and recently expanded codebase support to include Astro. With this latest update, teams in the research preview can:
See more of their Astro content in Source. You can now browse, search, and inspect local Astro content collections directly in Source’s Content View, in addition to the existing Sanity integration.
Get more hands-on control over your site. Move between Edit, Code, and Preview modes, use expanded styling controls, and reorganize elements with the Navigator. All visual edits follow a Stage → Review → Apply workflow.
What’s next?
Our team is heads down on the next major release in the research preview with some exciting updates already in the works:
Source customization for you and your team: Share your private custom Views with your teammates, create custom agents and add skills for you and your teammates.
More specialized Source agents: We’ll be adding new specialized agents that work across your site, brand and content workflows.
Webflow’s next-gen agentic CMS: We’ll be releasing the first iteration of a faster, more capable Webflow CMS that will allow you to create collections, items, and new CMS blocks (reusable content structures like a hero or a quote) directly in Source.
Over the next month we will be expanding access to the research preview even further so if you haven’t already, sign up here to get on the list.
To everyone already in the research preview: thank you for the notes, the bug reports, the screen recordings, and the occasional all-caps Slack message. Your feedback is directly shaping the future of Source, and we could not be more grateful.
We'll be back with another update soon. Until then, keep building!
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