Finishing up on my first big Webflow CMS project. Happy creating everything so far, with so many beautiful workflows around implementing CMS elements, but absolutely stunned to find out I have to deselect every "Collaborators can edit this element" on the site to prevent future disasters once giving my client access. I was expecting something so radically more advanced from this beautiful platform, that I'm quite shocked...

Please update this! I have no idea how this is still an issue.

I've expanded on this here with a number of fixes in the "collaborators can edit" capability.

https://wishlist.webflow.com/ideas/WEBFLOW-I-5092

Want to add two things-

1. Shouldn't editability be hierarchical in the element hierarchy? If I mark the Menubar as "collab can NOT edit" I'd like the menu items to also be non-editable. Sections, DIVs, etc. I can't think of any scenario where a container should be NON-editable, the a child of it SHOULD. Particularly as the WYSIWYG editor is about text and images almost exclusively.

2. Would be nice in the Designer to have a special view, where I can just see what's editable and what's not. Hit a button next to the eyeball top-left, and I'm seeing a grayscale version of my site, with sepia-colored areas that are editable. Something like that. Otherwise... it's impossible to tell before deployment what's editable and what's not. I get a lot of late night calls where a client broke a site by e.g. editing the text of a CMS-linked item and not realizing it would change ALL of them.

3. Going further on that specific example, elements which are linked to a CMS-Reference content should NEVER be editable in the WYSIWYG editor. It's not at all clear to a user that those pieces of text/images are shared by multiple collection items. Make them go to the Collection tab to edit those, so they can pick a new Reference item, instead of accidentally renaming a Reference item incorrectly. You don't want a client changing 1,000 shoes from Blue to Red when they were just trying to change the pair they're looking at. I think this should be a hard lock, but at a minimum, when you data-bind an element to a CMS Reference field, simply uncheck the "collaborators can edit" field to help protect against this kind of catastrophe.

Wow, I can't believe that this does not seem to have been sorted by now.

Any solution - the simpler it is - would help here:

• Uncheck all by default

• A setting under the Editor settings that allows us to check/uncheck all (set the default).

• Make the setting cascade down to child elements. So for instance, if you uncheck the Section element, all its children would be unchecked. Possibly the ability to uncheck the body element to check/uncheck all elements at once.

This is a much needed feature. It definitely takes a while to uncheck everything to hand off to the client. As another poster said, if not be default, being able to choose to apply the check/uncheck to an entire class or single element (much like in interactions) would be extremely beneficial and time saving.

Yeeeees! PLEASE make it unchecked by default. It´s crazy, I just had to manually deactivate this checkbox literally hundreds of times! It does not make any sense to give a collaborator all that access – they could mess up everything.

Alternatively (if deactivating by default is not possible for whatever reason):
It would also help massively if an element would inherit the setting from a parent element.

Definitely needed for serious client work.

I was doing a search and found this topic. I fully agree with everyone before me. Its absolutely necessary to be able to make a global option to make elements non-editable by default. I have not found this option anywhere in 2021.

it's insane that this is turned on by default. An untrained customer can't just customize things on the website. I would at most have individual texts customized and would like to be able to individually set what the customer can customize and what not. i now have to uncheck the box for what feels like thousands of elements.

please take out the collorator check mark in the basic settings.

Thank you

Yes absolutely! it must be so that this option is generally turned off and you select only the elements that should be editable for the client.

that would be very helpful if this would be changed.

I agree as well. I'm now on that task, as a new user of webflow, and was searching for an "uncheck all" option. Reading the comments and seeing it has been a request for over 4 years is crazy. Unless I'm missing something and it has been added in the last months... Back on the task, a few hundreds of checkboxes to uncheck...

I agree with all of the previous comments. Also would be nice to be able to uncheck items and anything nested underneath would automatically be unchecked (or checked) or have the choice of individual item and hierarchy.

Would be great as an option in settings to choose if it's checked/unchecked by default but if that's not an option, then definitely unchecked by default.

We're having to uncheck everything now as well. We will build this in our workflow, but when we started out we didn't know we would be handing over access to selected editors. This default feature would really save time.

Please, please, please do this. Unchecking everything is insanity.

That, plus not being able to select multiple items, FFS!!!

yes, this is just an check box!!

This NEEDS to be sorted. 

Not done yet?