What do developers think of Shopify theme blocks?

What are theme blocks?

In short, ‘theme blocks’ are designed to be an alternative to the traditional ‘section blocks’ which are tied to the section they are coded for. If you have a ‘button’ section block within a rich text section but want to use the same block within an ‘image-with-text’ section, you need to manually copy the block’s code and settings from section to section.

In contrast, theme blocks are re-usable across sections and nestable within each other. This allows them to be far more modular and versatile within the theme editor.

If you aren’t familiar with theme blocks, the Shopify Blocks documentation provides further detail.

What makes theme blocks important?

As the name might suggest, building a theme with section blocks feels very section focused. Sections are tailor made for their purpose and then slotted together to make the theme. Elements like buttons or image wrappers can be reused between sections using snippets.

Building a theme oriented around theme blocks changes the focus to the blocks themselves, with sections feeling more like vehicles for those blocks.

As sections can’t use both section blocks and theme blocks, developers with themes on the Shopify store are left with a dilemma.

If you want to incorporate theme blocks within a section, the section needs to be rebuilt with theme blocks in mind, and the rebuild would then break all the merchants’ settings when they update their theme. 

As Thomas, Technical Director and Founder of Brickspace Lab put it to me:

“We are building a new ‘theme block’ powered theme that will be the foundation for all future themes. It's not really possible for us to update our current themes without introducing many breaking changes.”

Michaël Gallego, lead developer of Maestrooo themes described how they have been burned by large Shopify updates before, when a colour scheme update broke for a lot of merchants when they tried to update.

“Theme blocks being a much bigger change, this is a no-go for us for our existing themes. For newer themes (for instance Stretch) we adopted theme blocks where it made sense. When we released the theme there were unfortunately too many limitations on theme blocks that did not allow us to adopt them more.”

Michaël would like to see Shopify introduce improvements to their theme upgrade system, which is fortunately in the works according to an August Ask Me Anything run by Shopify staff.

Mitch, content creator for Clean Canvas, believes theme blocks negatives outweigh their positives to the extent that they won’t be working with them until improvements are made:

“I think it's unnecessary, I think someone at Shopify needed to justify a bonus or something…We honestly hope that Shopify looks at this, and is like, ‘yeah, this isn't good. We need to redesign this or get rid of it’... We're not to do a thing for now, we're way too focused on other tasks to really consider trying to do this, and we don't like the idea of having to create new themes for this. We're currently not working with theme blocks at the moment. We are going to continue to focus on our themes, and add new features to them. That's our priority.”

What do theme blocks mean for merchants?

Theme blocks give merchants more power to shape their themes how they wish, while increasing the risk of confusion within the theme editor. With the ability to nest 8 levels of theme blocks, there is a consensus among developers that theme blocks have a steeper learning curve for merchants than section blocks.

In their June blog, ​​theme studio Ultramarina laid out how they’ve tried to flatten that learning curve:

“From our past experience working with other site builders, we knew that merchants could easily be overwhelmed by too many levels of nesting. We chose to forgo generic wrapper blocks, even if it meant losing some flexibility, if it meant for a smoother merchant experience… We also focused on exposing global theme blocks only where they made the most sense, such as rich text sections and other areas where merchants need dynamic content flexibility. In order for a block to be considered a global theme block, we had to come up with a valid use case for it in more than two sections.”

Michaël worries there is a setup fatigue for merchants with theme blocks. With section blocks, adding a section would often only involve filling out a few settings. With theme blocks, adding a section involves adding and clicking into more blocks to fill out each of their block settings.

Many developers feel the theme editor hasn’t kept up with the functionality theme blocks offer, but believe there are plenty of avenues for improvement. Suggestions include:

• The ability to collapse block/section settings

• The ability to drag and drop blocks between blocks

• The ability to multi-select blocks and sections so they can be dragged or copied at the same time

• Building on the preset system to make setting up sections with theme blocks easier

• A theme setup page where the common components can be managed

The future of theme blocks?

The decision to split themes into more modular and compartmentalised elements makes sense in the context of Shopify’s increasing focus on AI. It’s no coincidence that AI generated blocks and theme blocks were formally released within the same Shopify Edition, and they have served as a springboard for the empowered AI generation within the recently released Renaissance Edition.

You can find a complete spectrum of developer opinions on theme blocks, from those who won’t touch them at all in their current state, to Ultramarina who “think [theme blocks] is one of the most exciting updates Shopify has ever shipped”.

However, there is a general consensus that improvements could have been made, and with Shopify’s direction towards structures that are as AI friendly as possible, hopefully a lot of those improvements are on the way.