Liquid templates with block render - is a flexibility regression?

Online Store and Theme Development
1

Short description of issue

Can’t customers dynamicly change position (order) of the new blocks in the “.liquid” template?

Reproduction steps

  1. Create a “.liquid” template file.
  2. Add a few new {% block %} elements.
  3. Open a theme customizer and no UI for the blocks appeared.

Additional info

If the above is true, can we continue to use json templates with dynamic sections?

What type of topic is this

General discussion

2

Hey! You can absolutely continue to use JSON.

The promise we make with Liquid themes is that everything is a forever API — so JSON templates will always be supported.

Similarly, 15 years of themes using Liquid templates, pre-JSON, are still supported.

What we’re previewing now is the architecture we believe in for the future, and that we’re investing the most into — but there are a number of things that still need to come before this gets to parity with JSON templates. Editor support as a whole is the first thing we’re working on. We will also later have support for Apps, Markets contextualization, and Rollouts. These are all mission-critical things to land before we encourage widespread adoption of this architecture.

Our goal with this preview is to give all our developers as much heads up as possible so they can start to think about how they want to work, and so they can give us feedback on what feels good and what still needs some love.

If building a theme today, the best advice I could give to be aligned with how we’re thinking about the future is —

  1. Build with Theme Blocks as the core composition layer
  2. Use Tailwind for styling
  3. Don’t try to make every single thing a setting, constrain yourself to just the things you would need in a polished, tight design system — usually under 5 settings per block. 2-3 in many cases. (Text and media settings excluded from that count).
  4. Partials + Standard Actions for all mutations and reactivity

Then you get very little difference between the templates and converting it to Liquid in the future, if you want, becomes trivial.

3

2.Use Tailwind for styling

Does that mean we may see next Shopify flagship theme w/ Tailwind? :folded_hands: