22nd Aug 2016
This post is a part of a series of technical notes and tutorials on Shopify. Shopify is an eCommerce platform built with merchants in mind, check it out!
Building themes in Shopify is an enjoyable process - Shopify's Liquid templating language allows you to create easily and expressively while being robust enough to extend later down the line when your store grows. Here are 5 of my most used tools when developing themes:
Caroline Schnapp is an employee at Shopify and very active user on the forums - helping users out with her code samples and snippets. She's got a goldmine of snippets and repos on her GitHub account that will show you how extensible the platform can be.
The Liquid for Designers reference is a GitHub wiki page which can serve as a guide for new theme developers if read from top-to-bottom. It's also an excellent reference for all of the things that can be done between a pair of liquid tags. Bookmark it!
DeployBot is an automated continuous integration tool that aids deployments - sync it to a git repository and it can deploy your code just about anywhere, including Shopify. It has a user-friendly interface and offers tons of integrations such as Slack, HipChat and email notifications. Check their guide on how to get it set up!
The liquid object reference allows you to check what Liquid objects you can use on the page you are building. It has a list of global variables and examples on how to access the object for each entry. Shopify also has a Cheat Sheet available with a distilled, nicely presented version of this information.
When working on Shopify themes, you can use DeployBot to deploy to your main theme - but for testing or collaborating, I tend to keep my theme separate and sandboxed. You can then use a tool such as ThemeKit by Shopify to deploy to your personal theme, safe in the knowledge that no-one will see your (breaking!) changes.
That's it! Get creating and let me know on twitter @markgono if there're any tools that you use that make developing themes easier!