Are you ready to learn how to create, manage and edit databases in Wix? Wait for it, wait for it. We've got to do our database dance!
All right guys. Quick warning. Before we jump into it, I tend to speak at 80 words per minute with occasional gusts up to 500 words per minute. So if you get lost at any point, I would kindly ask that you rewind rewatch it just to make sure you got it. And if you still didn't get it, go ahead and comment down below so I can help and answer your question.But what are we waiting for? You're here to learn how to create and manage and edit those databases in Wix. So let's jump in.
Did you catch me still doing my database dance? I'm excited. Hey, listen. I know you want to get into the video, but I've got one quick ask of you. Can you go ahead and smash that subscribe button in the bottom right of this video and turn those bell notifications on. Why? Because you'll instantly plug into an amazing Wix Nation community of 33,000 plus like-minded entrepreneurs looking to do exactly what you're looking to do, which is to grow your presence online, build your infrastructure on Wix so you can grow your revenue and increase your impact on the world.
I know that sounds enticing to you because that's what you're looking to do. So smash that subscribe button to be part of a community that's looking to do that same exact thing. Alright, now let's go make some databases.
How To Create, Manage & Edit Wix Corvid Databases
The year is 2020, just like my vision. So I'm protecting it with these blue light glasses as we dive into the laptop and onscreen in the editor. So that's right. Pull up your editor. Let's get into it because it's time to start creating databases.
All right. So we're here in the editor. Now the next question is how do we even activate the tools to allow us to create the database? What you're going to do is you're going to scroll up here to Dev Mode, and you're going to turn on Dev Mode. Once you turn on Dev Mode, you'll get a nice, welcome to Corvid video. I'm going to X out because I've been welcomed to Corvid. I can't count how many times, because I've built many sites here in Wix. But Corvid is an awesome tool. Then what you're going to notice, this is a new feature that Wix has added to increase your productivity and speed at which you create databases, manage that databases and edit databases over here on the left.
You'll see this little content manager, go ahead and click on that because this is now where you're going to be able to manage your databases from that's right? No more having to worry about, you know, pulling out that tree over here on the left with the Corvid tools, you can still go that route, but this route is a little bit cleaner and easier. And then you're going to see three tabs content manager, add content elements, and learn more today.
Creating The Wix Database
We're going to be that content manager tab, this content managers, where all of your collections or databases are going to be contained. What you're going to do to create a database is you're going to go ahead and create new collection. When you do that, this is going to be the start of the database creation process. It will introduce you to content collections, and then you're going to press start creating. You can either choose a preset or start from scratch. Let me give you the benefits.
If you use a preset, you'll already get a dynamic pages set up ready for you to use with that collection. So if you already know you're going to need dynamic pages with this database you're about to create might as well use the preset and it'll already have the data sets on those pages too. However, if you're not sure what the destiny of this database looks like for you, go ahead and start from scratch. It's not hard to add the dataset and create a dynamic page, literally two clicks, but it's completely up to you.
I'm going to start from scratch just because we're focusing solely on databases today. Not dynamic pages. When I click start from scratch, it will have me create collection. First things first, you need to name your database, make sure you give this database a name. That's going to be recognizable to you internally. So that way you can say, "Okay, this is where my user profile pages are stored. Okay. This is where my new leads are stored." Whatever that title is, make sure it's recognizable to you or anyone on your team internally. Otherwise you're going to have to jump through a whole bunch of databases, whether that's in your dashboard or any editor trying to remember which one has Wix content.
So I'm just going to title this user profile page and the collection ID. This is going to be the ID that's used in the code. So you're going to want to make sure this is unique. I recommend just keeping it the same name as the database. Just know that you won't be able to create another ID for your code. That's exactly the same as this one. Otherwise it'll contradict a code and your code won't work. So just keep that in mind.
Once you do that, you're going to choose what this collection is used for. So what is this database used for in this particular case? I said, user profile page. So you can come in here and you can actually set the permissions of your database. Site content means anyone can view content from this form submission. Anyone can update or upload content into this database. A member generated content. This means only members can submit and modify the data, members-only content means only members can view the data members only form submission means only members can actually upload into the database, not edit, just upload into the database. And then you have private data. This is simply for admins only. So that means only you will be able to say, see the data contained in here. And lastly, custom use, I almost always choose custom use. Call me crazy because some of these other preset permissions would work perfectly, but maybe I'm a little anal and I just have to do it myself. Maybe. I don't know, maybe that's me, but I'm going to press custom use.
When I do that, it's then going to have us set up custom permissions. This is where you can choose who can read content from this collection. Since it's a user profile page, I'm going under the assumption that this is maybe a social network that someone has to register for in order to access content, to view it and to also post it. So with that in mind, who can read content from this collection site members, these people have to be registered in order to access the content who can create content site members. They have to be registered.
Managing The Wix Database
Now, this is where it switches a little bit who can update content from this collection. I'm going to choose site member, author, which means the person that originally created the piece of content is the person that can update it or modify it. This is no Wikipedia here that anyone could come in and change Abraham Lincoln's birthday to a February 19th, 2020 guys. That's not when he's born.
So we're going to move on from that. And we're also going to choose site member author, the same person that originally created the content has the ability to delete the content. No, as the admin, do you have the back end to also view the content as well in the databases, but I'm going under the assumption that this is some type of membership social network style website. Then I'm going to set and create collection, Wix is going to work its magic like it always does. And it pops open our blank collection here. There's nothing in here other than one field, which is title. This is a default field within the Wix databases. It cannot be removed. It cannot be deleted. You can use it if you'd like to, but it can not be moved. It cannot be deleted. And it also won't impact anything either.
So just because it's in there, it doesn't mean you have to use it. You don't have to use it and you can still display all of your other data. Perfectly fine no worries. It's up to you. But once we've got into our database here, I want to first draw your attention because this tutorial was about creating a database and then managing and editing the database as well.
So what I first want to draw your attention to is up at the top you'll see sandbox and you'll see live. There is a difference between sandbox and live. Sandbox is think of it as your testing playground. This is your database to test stuff in to see if it works in the editor to make sure you're on track. Make sure everything's copacetic. Your live database is where your actual live data lives. This is on your published site. Whatever data moves into the live database is going to be published. This includes your members as well.
So any members that register on your published website are going to be contained in the live database. So you need to know the distinction between the two, because if you make changes in sandbox and you want them to carry over to live, you have to sync them to live and you can sync those changes to live by going over here to this sync button, clicking sync, and then you'll see your sync options. You can copy all items that are in your sandbox database over to live, which means everything in the sandbox will go to live. You can copy only selected items. So if you only want a few of the items from your sandbox going to live, you can copy a few or you can replace all of your items from live to your sandbox. So you can test with live data in a sandbox environment, in a testing environment, rather than manipulating the live environment.
That's actually going to make real changes to people's data. So that's what those are. That's how they work. You do have the ability to sync, but I wanted to draw your attention to that first and foremost.
Editing The Wix Database
Now we named this database user profile page. I'm going to go under the assumption and you can add as many or as little fields as you want in a Wix database. However, I'm going under the assumption. We're going to have a few key fields for a profile page in Wix. Name, profile picture, bio, and well, those are the three I'm going to go for it. Name, profile picture, bio. We're not creating the dynamic page in here, so we don't have to go all elaborate. I'm showing you strictly how to use this.
So with that said to create your first field, what you're going to do is you're going to press add field this little plus button you're then going to name the field, make sure you name the field. Something that you can recognize internally. That is clearly indicating what type of data is in that field. I'm going to name this full name, the field type. It is going to be a text field. Why? Because people are entering their name. That is texts. That's nothing else. It's another media content type. And then we're going to press add. Perfect. Now we've got our full name. We're going to press ad again because we want them to upload a profile picture. I'm going to name this field profile picture.
The field type on this is not going to be text. It is going to be image. And we are going to press add why? Because they're uploading an image of themselves, a profile picture. And then lastly, we are going to add bio. That's not how you spell bio, but this is you can have this be a text field if you want, just know that however, you display the text on your dynamic page and whatever text styling you do on the dynamic page is going to be how the bio looks.
If you want to give more control to the actual content user or the member themselves, as far as styling goes between fonts, bolding, italicized, links, media, stuff like that, you would change it to rich text and rich texts. I'll show you right here. If you double click on this field in the database, you can see you have styling options to actually style the content, which is still text the text in this particular field. So you can go ahead and change the sizing of the font, the color, the font, the boldness, highlighting. You can link. You can create bullets, you can shift alignment. You can do all those things with rich text, with a regular text field, you cannot. So that's how I would tell you to note that. So that's important to know.
Then just for some reference, if we look at some of the field types, a couple of other types of fields, you can enter our reference fields. This is where you'll reference another database. So data from another database and you're referencing it. This is typically when you get a little bit more sophisticated and you've got lots of databases working together. That's where a reference field comes into play. A number this would be like a phone number you know, a monthly budget number in that sense address. This is a physical address. It'll pull from Google maps. If you get the API key from Google, which you can do either way, it'll still pull location. Audio straight forward. This is audio files. Booleans this is like little checkboxes. Yes, no, those are booleans date and time. It's literally a date and time picker. It's actually a pretty intuitive, robust looking feature on which people can pick a date and time.
For instance, if you wanted people to go through your checkout process and schedule a delivery date and time, there you go. Key feature a file. This can be like a PDF. That's a file image. We just did image media gallery. This could be, you know, pictures and a gallery, a rich text. We just did that tags. This is pretty cool. You can create unique tags so people can click one tag and then see all the content related to that particular tag in the database on a page on time, again, straight forward. So maybe people can schedule a delivery date time, or they can just schedule a time with you that's time-related.
Then you have URL straight forward. This is a link. And then lastly, video they can upload video into the database. However, right now, video only works in a strip. And that's about the only use you can go about creating and uploading videos from YouTube and Vimeo and looking, making it look more native. If you follow my tutorial up in the card there. But those are all the different field types in the database that you can add.
Import/Export
So right now we've created the database. I've kind of showed you how to manage, edit the database a little bit. What I wanted to next draw your attention to is import export. So import export over here on the right. You can actually import data from a file. So from like an Excel document, if you've got already all of these fields matched up fields, name, field names, matched up to what they already are in your database, in a whole Excel doc, you can save yourself a whole lot of time, rather than manually updating that data, just import your Excel doc. And it'll pull all the data and put it all arranged into the columns for you, or you can export.
So if you want to take the data that you've been collecting from your Wix database and pull it out so that way you can review it in Excel and have more data manipulation and data analysis, you can do that as well. So that's another thing to take into account.
You can always change the permissions of your database by clicking back on this permissions tab. If you write, realize, "Hey, this is not the type of permissions I want. I want anybody to be able to view the content." You would simply come back in here and change this to anyone and then press save. And then your permissions are updated hooks. This gets a little bit more complicated. You can use hooks to pull from custom JavaScript. We're not going to get into that in this particular video.
And then you've got visible fields over here. So you see right now, ID owner created date, updated date. These are all fields that are not currently visible. If you wanted to make them visible, you just simply check them on. And these are internal, Wix fields. So Wix tracks this information. When was the data created? When was the data edited? Who's the owner of that data. What's the ID of that owner that has that data. And those are all fields that are tracked by Wix but typically aren't displayed. You can display them if you want.
After that, you can short your data so you can store it from A to Z. You can sort from Z to A, you can store from newest to oldest, or you can add a custom store. And then in addition to that, you can filter data. So you can add a filter. You can choose a field. Maybe you want to choose full name and you want full name contains Michael. And then if we had any Michaels in this database, when we press add filter, what would happen is the database would only display people with the full name that contains Michael in it. And you would see all the Michaels in your database and that's how you filter the database.
Database Accesses
So overall we've created our database. We manage it, we're editing it. And the last thing I want to show you is another place you can access your database within Wix without having to be in the editor. So you've got your database here. You're good. You're done. I'm going to go ahead and press publish. And now what we can do, I'm actually going to edit the name of the site to "Edit Testing DB", and I'm going to press check done. And then I'm going to go ahead and publish that puppy again.
Now what we can do is we can actually access our database from our Wix dashboard as well. So if we go into our Wix dashboard for our particular site that we've just created, instead of having to go into the editor every time you want to create, well actually you have to go in the editor usually to create, but instead of having to go in the editor to manage and edit data all the time, what you can do is from your dashboard, you can actually scroll down and you can see database on this left sidebar, you can click it. And then you'll see, and it's got a new gallery view, which is kind of cool.
You'll see all of your content managers, all your collections, all of your databases in here, and you can actually open the collection straight from your dashboard. You can also also filter between your live in your sandbox database. No, by default, when you enter through the Wix dashboard it is going to your live database. So if you want to make sure you manipulate from sandbox, click sandbox. However, you have to manage your sandbox in the editor. It's only the live database that you'll be able to manipulate from your dashboard.
But you can choose to view all the data in here. And you can see it's the same type of style as in the dashboard. And you can choose to manage fields. You can change the view. If you want it to be more of a list or a gallery, you can do that, or you can keep it as a table and you can even add new database items by going up here, or you can import or export from the live database as well.
Conclusion
And just like that, that is how you create, manage and update databases in Wix. Let's get our database dance on in a like button down below because we're high energy and this was a helpful video. And now you feel inspired and motivated to go out there and make it happen.
There, you have it. We just created, edited and managed databases in Wix. My name is MPS from Wix Training Academy. I appreciate you watching this video. If you enjoyed it, I would ask that you drop a like down below, you saw that some of my words had gusts up to 500 words a minute. So if you didn't catch something or you need some clarification comment down the low.
And lastly, I would kindly ask if this is a community Wix Nation, that you'd like to be a part of that you smash that subscribe button right down in the bottom, right of this video. That's right. Take your mouse to do hit that subscribe button, the bottom. Right's not hard to do. And I upload fun quality with strain and content. That's obviously going to benefit you and you'll plug into 32,000 plus like-minded entrepreneurs looking to do exactly what you're looking to do, which is to grow your presence online, build your infrastructure on Wix so you can increase your revenue and increase your impact on the world. Sounds pretty awesome to me. I'm not sure about you.
Thanks again for watching. I'll catch you on our next one.