Quick Start

What is theme?

A theme determines the way that a Shoplazza online store looks and feels. it shapes the online store experience for merchants and their customers.

What is theme made of?

Shoplazza themes are built using Liquid, along with HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and JSON. Using these languages, developers can create any look and feel that their clients want.

How developers can take part in theme building?

As a theme developer, you can customize themes for Shoplazza merchants. These customizations might range from small tweaks to complete redesigns.
You can checkout the following quick steps to: learn how to customize a theme to meet a merchant's needs.

1. Learn Shoplazza's theme architecture

A theme controls the organization, features, and style of a merchant's online store. Theme code is organized with a standard directory structure of files, as well as supporting assets such as images, stylesheets, and scripts.

As a theme developer, you can optimize the organization, features, and style of themes for your merchants.

The organization of each page is determined by the following components.

1. The layout file
2. The template assigned to the resource being displayed
3. The sections.
4. The blocks that each section contains

Features can be introduced to themes in Liquid template files, sections, blocks, and snippets. You can implement theme features using Liquid, CSS, and JavaScript. The features included in the theme inform how customers can interact with the content on an online store.

NEXT: For more detailed theme architecture please checkout the pages in architecture section.

2. Become a theme developer for a merchant

Developers or merchants can customize their theme from the Shoplazza admin by using the theme editor. Themes can offer different customization options to enable merchants to create their desired customer experience:

• You can make your theme templates modular by creating multiple sections and blocks. Refer to our section and block best practices to learn how to design sections and blocks effectively.
• You can create settings to allow the merchant to control the appearance or behavior of the theme.

The most common theme-related task for developers is theme customization, where an existing theme is altered to meet a merchant’s needs. Customization jobs range from minor tweaks to major overhauls.

Merchants can invite developers as their store's staff in admin settings page, giving them the specific permission to modify the store's theme, in this way, developers can customize the store's theme on merchants behalf.

As a theme developer, you can optimize the organization, features, and style of themes for your merchants.

3. Start developing the theme

To optimize your theme development experience, Shoplazza has established a set of best practices that you can refer to when developing your theme and any surrounding toolchains and processes. Our best practices include the following:

• Designing and coding a theme - To create an optimal customer experience, and to keep your merchant's stores fast, accessible, and discoverable, you need to consider many factors. Shoplazza provide several principles and best practices that you can follow to design and build an optimized theme.

• Working on merchant stores - When you're developing or customizing a theme for a merchant, you should keep certain best practices in mind around security, and collaboration.