Best Practices for Updating to the Latest Style Guide

·May 07, 2025 01:58 PM·

Hi, is there a best practice for moving to the latest style guide? at: Updating existing projects | Relume ResourcesUpdating existing projects | Relume Resources Under Update your existing style guide to the latest Client-First version it says: Occasionally there are new versions of Client-First. Relume works closely with Finsweet on changes made to Client-First because these changes can have sweeping effects on the component library. That doesn't seem very helpful in describing the steps. For example, can I create a page that is "style guide new" while leaving the old one in place? Should I delete the current one before creating the new one? What is most likely to work and to create the fewest issues? Thanks

4 comments

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Matt J.
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Jonathan S. ah yeah thanks for that feedback. Officially, we don't recommend trying to "upgrade" a style guide to the latest version. Lots of reasons for those but the main one is the variables - even if you were to create those variables, they still have hidden ID's that webflow doesn't expose and so when you paste in a component that is supposed to use one of those variables, it wont sync and it'll throw an "unknown variable" on that color. Our recommended approach would be to change your preferences in the variables tools to match your style guide. So if you have one that is v2 or v1.5, we'd recommend switching to that. The downsides to this approach is that you would not be able to use our webflow app to import pages or style guides and if thats ultimately your goal here, then your only path forward is to duplicate the latest style guide and then you'll have everything you need to import. Beyond just variables, there's custom code embeds, there's certain sections in the style guide that the app requires, and a few other requirements that need to be met in order for the very technical and complex webflow app to import properly. If you can provide more context of what your end goal is, I can try to help with more specific steps to take to help unblock you - happy to help.
Jonathan S.
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Is variable issue something that is expected to always lead to problems when upgrading? Is there any work on finding a way around this? Also, for a smaller site, is it worth considering creating a new site with the newest style guide and copying and pasting existing pages into it, to at least have a foundation for using new / additional components and variables going forward.
Matt J.
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Only workaround would be to clone the style guide, copy/paste in existing pages, and assign the variables to the various elements and as you mentioned, at the very least you’ll be future proof for imports/pastes.
Matt J.
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and no, variable issues are not something to expect once you've started using a newer version of the style guide (v2+) - thats when Webflow introduced the variables feature and we implemented them into our style guide.

Best Practices for Updating to the Latest Style Guide | Relume Community

Matt J.
·
·
Jonathan S. ah yeah thanks for that feedback. Officially, we don't recommend trying to "upgrade" a style guide to the latest version. Lots of reasons for those but the main one is the variables - even if you were to create those variables, they still have hidden ID's that webflow doesn't expose and so when you paste in a component that is supposed to use one of those variables, it wont sync and it'll throw an "unknown variable" on that color. Our recommended approach would be to change your preferences in the variables tools to match your style guide. So if you have one that is v2 or v1.5, we'd recommend switching to that. The downsides to this approach is that you would not be able to use our webflow app to import pages or style guides and if thats ultimately your goal here, then your only path forward is to duplicate the latest style guide and then you'll have everything you need to import. Beyond just variables, there's custom code embeds, there's certain sections in the style guide that the app requires, and a few other requirements that need to be met in order for the very technical and complex webflow app to import properly. If you can provide more context of what your end goal is, I can try to help with more specific steps to take to help unblock you - happy to help.
Jonathan S.
·
·
Is variable issue something that is expected to always lead to problems when upgrading? Is there any work on finding a way around this? Also, for a smaller site, is it worth considering creating a new site with the newest style guide and copying and pasting existing pages into it, to at least have a foundation for using new / additional components and variables going forward.
Matt J.
·
·
Only workaround would be to clone the style guide, copy/paste in existing pages, and assign the variables to the various elements and as you mentioned, at the very least you’ll be future proof for imports/pastes.
Matt J.
·
·
and no, variable issues are not something to expect once you've started using a newer version of the style guide (v2+) - thats when Webflow introduced the variables feature and we implemented them into our style guide.