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Shopify Online Store 2.0, or Shopify OS 2.0, is a large upgrade to the way Shopify themes are built. It's a new and improved way of building themes that means you, the store owner, get a whole bunch of new features.
There's a lot of changes, especially for developers - but for us Merchants, we'll cover the most exciting changes below.
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Sections on all of your pages
This one is huge, and the main reason we recommend all our clients to update to OS 2.0.
You can now add sections and customise page layouts for your whole store - not just your home page.
That's right.
Customisable sections on:
- Home pages
- Collection pages
- Product pages
- Standard Pages
- Blog posts and Blog Posts
- everywhere!
Sections bring home page style customisability to all pages, including your collections and products.
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Unique templates for any page
Together with Sections on all pages, you can now also easily duplicate templates within the Theme Customiser. This can help you build out unique page designs - whether for a single landing page, or for a subset of products.
Maybe you have a set of products that needs a bit more content on their product pages... No stress - you can create a new Product template, add in your additional sections, and assign the template to those products.
You can effectively build out your Page, Collection, and Product templates within the theme customiser. This encourages a more consistent look/feel, and reduces the need for page builder apps.
A quick demo video of the updated theme customiser below.
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Dynamic / flexible store content
When creating content in the theme customiser, you can now link that content to dynamic sources.
Maybe you want a different description to appear in a Section that you've placed on a product page.
Now you can set a metafield on the Product with that description, and the theme will automatically display that content on the Product page.
In the Shopify example below they:
- Define a new Metafield for Product Dimensions (this creates a field on the product settings page)
- They upload an image to the newly created Metafield for Product Dimensions on the product settings page
- In the theme customiser, they create a new Section, and set the Dynamic Source to that Image.
- When viewing the product on the front end, that image that displays will be pulled from the Metafield setting for that product.
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App blocks for apps
Once app developers get their 2.0 support updated, apps in OS 2.0 will be installed within an 'app block'.
This means it will be easier you to place the app features (like review summaries) in the areas you want them on the layout.
It also means apps will functionality more consistently no matter which theme you are using or installing them into.
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Should you update your theme to Online Store 2.0?
If the theme developer of your theme has released a 2.0 version, we generally recommend updating your theme. Many of these features are a huge boon to functionality and are worth an update in themselves.
However, due to the large differences in theme architecture, updating to a 2.0 version of your theme may be complex. If your theme has had some customisations to it done in the past, these will need to be manually carried over into OS 2.0 by a Shopify developer.
If you're interested in updating, but are unsure, just reach out to us for a quick chat.
