New Style Settings for Themes

Continuous innovation is key to maintaining a competitive and attractive online store. Shopify, always at the forefront of providing effective tools for merchants, has introduced new updates that promise to revolutionize the online store experience. Starting with the Summer 2023 release, the Shopify team has redesigned the online store experience to enable theme developers to offer merchants greater customization options for their storefront. Here's everything you need to know about the new style settings and functionality for theme blocks, now in developer preview.

New Style Settings for Themes

The new style settings represent a breakthrough for merchants who want greater control over the appearance of their website. These settings connect directly to CSS properties and allow you to adjust values ​​for different breakpoints. This means merchants can now easily customize the mobile look of their site without having to set a separate option for each breakpoint.

Shopify offers a wide range of styling options through Style panels, starting with Layout, Size, and Spacing, with more options coming soon. Using these panels, theme developers get a complete set of settings that merchants can customize. This way, they don't have to manually create every single setting, making it easier to provide merchants with greater styling flexibility to better express their brand.

Extending Theme Blocks Functionality

The latest update expands the capabilities of **theme blocks** introduced as a developer preview in the Winter 2024 release. These blocks are designed to be more generic and reusable within a theme, giving developers greater control over how the blocks can be used by merchants. Two key new features are:

Block Targeting

Block targeting allows developers to specify which theme blocks merchants can add to a given section or parent block. For example, a slideshow section that only accepts slide blocks. This additional control maintains the flexibility and reusability of theme blocks while improving the organization and consistency of the site's layout.

Static Blocks

Static blocks can now be rendered statically, so they can't be reordered or deleted by merchants. This allows developers to create layouts with specific behaviors that merchants can't change, such as conditionally rendering a "view all" button that only appears when there are more products in the collection than are displayed on the page.

How to Access the Developer Preview

These new features aren't yet ready for adoption in your existing themes. The goal of the developer preview is to familiarize yourself with the platform's new features and share feedback with Shopify as they roll out further updates. If you haven't tested theme blocks yet, follow the developer preview steps to access these new features. After enabling the developer preview, you'll be able to test these features in a reference theme that you can upload to your development store.

A Look to the Future

Shopify plans to further expand its customization options. Future additions include:

Advanced Style Settings

Shopify will expand the coverage of commonly used CSS properties through additional panels, such as typography, background, border, and effects. Developers will also be able to create their own custom style settings, manually linking them to CSS properties, giving merchants more control over their site's style.

Data Connections for Theme Blocks

To simplify data connections, theme blocks will have the ability to pass resources like products, collections, and metaobjects to their children, making it easier to manage data even with complex and nested layouts.

Edit Layout by Drag and Drop

For merchants who don't know how to code, flexible sections will make it easier to customize layouts, allowing you to drag and drop elements to resize, group, and edit content. This will make the theme editor even more intuitive and accessible.

Conclusion

Shopify's new updates offer advanced tools to enhance your online store experience, allowing for greater customization and more efficient content management. If you'd like to take full advantage of these features and grow your business with Shopify, contact Yastime, the expert Shopify agency, for more information and support. With Yastime by your side, you'll be ready to take your business to new heights of success.