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This seems kind of like a gut punch to all the agencies that invested time and resources into building clients’ sites in Slate and now they’re kind of on their own if they find bugs unless an internal Shopify developer is facing the same issue.

And what they explained that means is they will only fix bugs if “Shopify developers own work is blocked”.

Low Maintenance – And finally Shopify announced earlier this year that they put the project on “low maintenance”.

So if you were working on building a theme on one version of Slate, the next month you might have to rewrite significant parts of your theme in order to stay compatible with the latest version. Even v1.0 is considered beta and there have been many breaking changes along the way.

Beta – Despite Shopify pushing Slate as their theme development platform for the future, it has never gotten out of beta.

Some agencies might view that as a bonus because they don’t want pesky clients editing their theme, but I view it as a net negative because you don’t even have the option and merchants are kind of taken aback when they find out they no longer have the control with Shopify that they thought they did.

Admin Them Editor – Because the JS and CSS files are stored on the server compiled this also means that it’s not really possible to edit these files from the Admin.

Agency Transition – When a Shopify merchant changes agencies, unless the prior agency freely gives their Slate build files, the new agency can’t really edit/maintain the old theme because all the Javascript and CSS files are compiled on the server and basically unreadable/uneditable.

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I ended up having to set up a MacOS build server for our developers on Windows to be able to update Slate themes.

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I (Mark) am a Mac user, but our development team has a mix of Windows and Mac users so this poses an immediate problem. MacOS support only – The first of these issues is that for all of its life, Slate has never officially supported Windows.I’ve found Slate to be able to expedite initial theme development, but it poses many problems maintaining themes long term that I don’t think make it a suitable framework. And in theory, it was supposed to be a build system that would speed up Shopify theme development by integrating a lot of modern frontend build features like Webpack, local development asset server, and multiple deployment environments.īut however well-intentioned, I think it missed the mark. In their documentation, it specifically states Slate is an “ opinionated” theme framework. Slate was the opposite of a “no rules” development approach and that could have been great because Shopify theme development can be a bit of a wild west as I’ve inherited sites with very custom themes that were a Frankenstein of many different JS frameworks. Slate was the first official build toolkit for developing Shopify themes. That lasted for many years until Slate came along.Ģ years ago Shopify also released a node.js wrapper for ThemeKit so you could build your own build process around ThemeKit. Instead of having a very opinionated frontend framework they’ve left it up to the individual developers to use the frameworks and libraries they choose. Shopify has been appreciated among many developers for its simplicity and flexibility of frontend development.

This is extremely helpful for frontend developers as doing significant development in the Admin theme editor is laborious.

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It has just a few basic functions to download themes and watch for changes on your local files and then upload them to Shopify.

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ThemeKit is the Shopify development tool that allows you to work with a theme on your store through your local code editor rather than the Shopify Admin. And many apps require some theme customization for the installation process. So most merchants and developers have inevitably built a fair amount of custom code and logic into their themes. Part of the reason for that is that besides building apps, there is not a simple way to create your own backend logic in Shopify. A Shopify merchant that is just getting started might buy a theme from the Shopify theme store or Theme Forest, but over time as they grow and evolve their Shopify theme becomes much more than a “theme”.

I think the reason why frontend “theme” development on Shopify matters so much is that themes on Shopify aren’t just “themes” to most merchants.

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