Shopify introduces Online Store 2.0: What it Means For Merchants?

Online store 2.0 or Sections Everywhere is one of the biggest Shopify updates in 2021, below are the main benefits of this recent update

1- Sections on every page

Up until now, merchants have been limited in how they represent their businesses on Shopify, with the flexibility of sections being limited to only the home page. Code edits, elaborate workarounds with blocks, or custom apps were needed to achieve a similar effect across other pages.

That all changes with sections on every page. Now, merchants can add sections to all pages, not just the home page, unlocking a range of new opportunities to personalize every aspect of a store. 

2- Enhancements to the theme editor

To empower merchants to take advantage of these improvements and updates, Shopify have made substantial enhancements to the theme editor.

Instead of needing to drill down into different sections, the editor now displays a tree view of all the content on a page in the sidebar. From this sidebar, merchants can hide most blocks, with the exception of the header and the footer (which can contain blocks that can be moved or hidden, but can’t be hidden themselves). These changes let merchants easily update the hierarchy of a page. 

3- Liquid input setting

An additional update to the theme editor is the new Liquid input setting that will allow merchants to add custom Liquid code to pages directly from the editor. The Liquid setting is similar to the HTML setting type, except that it will allow access to Liquid variables, meaning merchants will be able to access global- and template-specific Liquid objects. 

This setting will reduce the need for merchants to manually change the code of a theme, particularly when adding code for apps that use Liquid. 

These changes make it easier for merchants to work with the new features of Online Store 2.0, and make decisions about their online store without engaging with a developer—freeing up your time to focus on building creative integrations and solutions.

4- Theme app extensions with app blocks

With the updated theme architecture comes an update to how apps integrate with the storefront. Currently, there’s no structured, end-to-end solution for apps to easily integrate with themes. Developers are left to build integration logic for every existing theme and host assets themselves, making it hard to build features that work consistently across all themes and are fast anywhere in the world.

Is My Theme Compatible With Online Store 2.0?

We are updating all our theme to be fully compatible with the new 2.0 update :

 Themes from Plak Theme and this update

• Plak (pending) 
• Grass (pending) 
• Sly (pending) 

Can I still using my current theme prior to 2.0?

All our themes prior to 2.0 update will continue to function, however, but new 2.0 features may not function.