Originally published here.
The future of commerce is powered by brands building the world’s most creative customer experiences, backed by the development teams that make those experiences possible using Shopify’s commerce platform.
At this year’s Unite, Shopify’s annual partner and developer conference, we introduced the largest set of infrastructure innovations in Shopify’s history, opening up a whole new world of customization for brands.
Businesses seeking the best experience for their customers will no longer be blocked by technical constraints—we’ve unlocked more developer capabilities than ever to build the future of commerce for merchants.
Here are the products and tools coming later this year to help you unlock your creativity with customizations, build for conversions, and scale with confidence.
Have an in-house developer team or outsource development to an agency? Share these technical announcements with them.
1. Unlock creativity with customizations
Online Store 2.0
At Shopify Unite, we announced one of the biggest updates to our online store platform to date: Online Store 2.0—a combination of new features and improvements that significantly expand our existing customization options.
Once your development team migrates your theme to Online Store 2.0, it will be easier to control the layout and aesthetic of your store, giving you access to more data with revamped metafields and arming your development team with a streamlined set of developer tools that integrate seamlessly with Shopify.
Customize your online store with sections and blocks on every page
With sections and blocks, effortlessly personalize your store by adding, rearranging, and removing content without editing code.
Drag and drop entire sections of video, products, or image galleries in the theme editor. Sections can be used on the home, landing, product, and collection pages to gain greater control and flexibility over your online store.
Blocks are like sections within sections, and they can be moved around or within sections, allowing for a more granular level of flexibility for businesses to create the store that best represents their brand.
Brands selling on Shopify Plus need only work with a theme developer to update themes to OS 2.0 standards before being able to see these improvements.
Display flexible store content
Data and content is what brings your store to life, and we’ve made big updates to how they’re both stored in Shopify. Once configured by developers, you’ll now be able to define and edit metafields directly in the admin, and connect metafields to apps or your theme that can be accessed by anyone on your team. This will significantly increase flexibility to capture and represent data specific to your brand.
You can now display and edit product and variant content directly from the admin in a few clicks. That means if you want to store additional product information in your shop, you can use metafields to display those values across your entire website.
For example, you can use metafields to display fabric care instructions or even to show special fields in the checkout page like delivery timeframes, backorder dates, and units sold.
Plus, simple product and variant configuration—like specifying which sizing chart is for which product—can be done by any staff member right on the product page.
Again, if you’re selling on Shopify Plus, all it takes is working with a theme developer to update your themes and apps to OS 2.0 standards to see these improvements.
See how your development team or agency can implement these changes with JSON templates
Integrate app blocks inside themes
More customization and flexibility around apps in the theme editor means added performance benefits: once set up by developers, you can integrate apps easily into themes.
App blocks mean you can easily integrate an app into your theme without touching code and manage that app right from the theme editor. When it’s time for you to uninstall the app, you can remove it without worrying about performance issues left behind from ghost code. Stay tuned for this feature later this year.
Accelerate theme development with intuitive developer tools
Brands can make advanced customizations more efficiently than ever, using our new suite of development tools. Merchants with in-house developers can now build better together in teams.
With the introduction of the Shopify GitHub integration, an updated Shopify CLI tool, and Theme Check, your development team can more easily develop, test, and deploy themes on Shopify.
Our GitHub integration allows you and your team to collaborate safely with native support for version control. You can implement workflows where changes must be reviewed and merged on GitHub before populating to a live theme. This integration also lets you share preview links from your team’s local server without manual syncing or pushing zipped files, meaning easier collaboration with your development team.
Learn more about developer tooling
We’re also introducing our first open-source reference theme, built to run 35% faster than our most popular theme and using all the new features in Online Store 2.0.
Introducing Dawn, an ultra-lightweight, mobile-first theme—maximizing flexibility while minimizing complexity and keeping things lean. Your development team can use Dawn as a model when unlocking sections on your own themes.
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