Offline Shopify Theme Editor
If you’ve ever developed a Shopify theme, you know that the process can be a bit of a pain. The platform’s great, but there are lots of little pain points that can drive you to frustration:
- No support for template or asset files other than those explicitly proscribed by Shopify.
- No automatic concatenation or minification on Shopify’s end, meaning you have to maintain a set of files for development and one for production.
- No ability to configure or manage a test store and test products locally, without having to mess around with an actual Shopify store.
- And the biggest pain point of all – no offline editing.
The last point is the real killer. Even with something like the Shopify Theme Gem (a tool which watches your local theme files and pushes them to your Shopify store), there’s an appreciable delay in the development cycle thanks to the edit-save-wait-refresh cycle.
I’m a Shopify theme creator, and these pain points bug me all the time. So, I’m thinking about setting out to fix it, with a cross-platform application that makes Shopify theme development a breeze. It would include:
- A 100% local development environment, perfectly simulating the live Shopify platform;
- The ability to live reload your theme design in the browser instantly on every save;
- Tools for creating and managing local test stores, products and orders;
- Support for custom directory structures and all common preprocessors like SCSS, LESS and Coffeescript;
- Deployment options for pushing themes to stores, and automatically creating .zip packages.
If you’re interested, you can sign up to a mailing list where I’ll keep you updated on the progress of this idea. I’ll only be using it to keep you updated on this project, no spam! Sign up to keep up to date.