Hi, new here and looking for advice
My team and I are working on a single custom e-commerce website with a lot of custom functionalities. We are experiencing issues with our development flow since some power users add custom code through the admin UI and we need to track those changes in Github.
We were hoping to find an elegant way to split our development team’s code from the website’s code. We looked into Shopify Theme App extensions, but the limitations are too strict for us to migrate all of our custom functionalities there.
Did anyone go through the same hurdle? Any tips on how to extend heavy customization of a single custom website without hitting the limitations set by Shopify?
For a bit of context: our website is currently built on a deprecated theme. Most of our features were developed by our internal development team in Vue and we were hoping to migrate those on an up-to-date theme maintained by Shopify (Pitch) and improve our workflow to be aligned with Shopify’s best practices.
Our website offers personalized cream formulations. We maintain customer skin profiles in our external API and apply them to products through custom attributes. Our solution includes a quiz to help customers create their skin profile, a dedicated page within their customer account for profile management, and integrated wrappers on both subscription services and add-to-cart buttons to incorporate this personalization.
Hey @mingo_omy - I can’t say for sure, but given your level of customization, I’d strongly recommend looking into to Shopify Hydrogen if you haven’t already. Hydrogen is a React-based framework specifically built for custom storefronts and you’d essentially have full control over your frontend code, proper version control without admin interference, and could handle your external API integration cleanly through the Storefront API. You could also go fully headless and just use the Storefront/Admin APIs themselves with a non-Shopify related frontend if you still wanted to use Vue directly (for example customer account details for the personalized formulations could live as metafields accessed by the Admin/Storefront APIs: About metafields and metaobjects).
Hydrogen would give you a clean separation, which is why I’d recommend looking into it. Essentially. your dev team owns the entire storefront codebase with proper Git workflows, and merchant/power user changes happen through Shopify’s admin for products, collections, and settings—not your actual application code. Hopefully I’m understanding things correctly here - let me know if I can help out further!
