Theme Updater is an APP for Shopify that can be used for updating themes semi-automatically. With an active subscription, you can use Theme Updater to keep your Shopify themes up to date with CMS content and code changes.
After updating, a list of conflicts may appear that need addressed. These are files usually containing template customizations that will need to be updated manually.
The more often you update your themes, the conflict list will be shorter so it is appropriate to regularly update themes and keep manual intervention to a manageable level.
Without manually updating the conflicted files, you will see issues with layout, images, sections, and other areas of your Shopify site. However, once the manual updates to the conflicted files are complete, the Shopify site will be back to its desired function.
The example above shows how the Theme Updater can help in large Shopify updates. Recently, Shopify 2.0 released and themes required updating from Shopify 1.0 but by using Theme Updater, the process became simpler.
From Shopify 1.0 to Shopify 2.0, quite a few features changed. Below is a chart comparing the two versions:
Default sections are now available for every page with Shopify 2.0 when previously with version 1.0, default sections were only available for the Home Page.
Some other notable changes are the preferred file language going from Shopify LIQUID to Shopify JSON and the coding used in Shopify 1.0 is hardcoded meta fields while in Shopify 2.0 dynamic sources are used to insert standard meta fields.
The JSON structure is different from the Liquid language and so updating from Shopify version 1.0 to 2.0 can require a lot of manual updating and take a longer amount of time than other updates.
Using the Theme Updater to update Shopify versions from 1.0 to 2.0 may increase the number of conflicts with conflicts being harder to solve. For example, if you have customized LIQUID code inside a template in Shopify 1.0, you have to convert it in Shopify 2.0 into a section.
In Shopify 2.0, everything has to be sectioned and in some cases version 1.0 sections might need to be converted into “snippets”. Usually, you need to re-import all the content of the theme, such as images and text.
There are plenty of advantages to updating to Shopify 2.0:
- Easier to update in the future…
The first update hurts because of the conversion from LIQUID to JSON but after that, the code is more organized and the customizations are sectioned better with less conflicts at the time of updating. - Sections can be reused everywhere, not just the homepage…
Users can add as well as drag and drop the sections in any template using the CMS. With Shopify 1.0, you need the developer to add it in the code of the template. - More organized…
The code is simpler to read and easier to keep clean.