CMS API: Breaking changes for CMS publishing

On July 7, 2025, we’re releasing important updates to how CMS items are published and managed via the API. These changes affect how you manage live items and publish CMS content with the API. Please review the breaking changes below to avoid disruptions.

Draft management improvements

The Webflow UI now supports saving draft changes to published CMS items without affecting live content. To maintain consistency between the UI and API, we’re introducing the following change:

Unpublishing live items Breaking Change

Previously, updating a live item’s isDraft property to true would unpublish a live item from the site. This behavior is changing to support improved draft management:

Updating an item’s isDraft property to true on a live item will no longer unpublish it
The item will remain live while draft updates can be made using the staged item endpoints.
Required Action: Update your code to use the dedicated unpublish endpoints: Unpublish Single Item or Unpublish Multiple Items

Affected endpoints:
If you’re using the following endpoints to unpublish live items, you’ll need to update your code to use the dedicated unpublish endpoints instead:

Understanding item status

In the Webflow UI, CMS items have a status field that maps to the item’s isDraft and lastPublished properties. Here’s how these properties determine an item’s status:

Status	`isDraft`	`lastPublished`	Description
Draft	`true`	`null`	Never published or previously unpublished item
Published	`false`	timestamp	Item is live on the site
Changes in draft	`true`	timestamp	Published item with pending changes in the staged item
Queued to publish	`false`	< `lastUpdated`	Changes will publish on next site publish. This is the default status for newly created items, as well as for updates to items that have already been published.

Note: The Unpublish Live Item endpoint sets isDraft: true and lastPublished: null.

Enhanced publishing flexibility 🎉

You can now publish CMS items with the API even when site domains are out of sync. For example, if you’ve published to staging but not to production. This removes the previous limitation that caused 409 errors in these scenarios. No changes needed here - instead, we expect that you’ll see less errors!

Affected endpoints:

Publish Collection Items

Required actions

Review Integrations
- Identify code using isDraft: true for unpublishing
- Test with beta APIs in development environment
Update Code
- Replace isDraft unpublishing with proper endpoints
- Test and verify changes in your development environment

Test changes with the Beta APIs

All functionality described above is available now through the Beta APIs under the /beta namespace. To test, replace /v2 with /beta in your API calls within a testing environment to see the new behavior in action. Unfortunately, the Webflow SDK doesn’t support the beta namespace at this time.

Timeline

Now - July 7, 2025: Testing period
- Test your integrations using the beta API endpoints
- Update code to use proper unpublish endpoints
July 7, 2025: Changes go live
- Breaking changes take effect in v2

For questions or more information, please see our post in the Webflow Forum