Complex product infos/images, but only one product template?

[midger]

Hi,

I am looking for a way to simplify product page designs in the backend. Right now I am creating a new template for every product (around 30 atm) and adapting that with infos and images. Updating a certain element that’s on every page results in a lot of work because I have to go through all these templates and manually change them. 

Is there a way to only have one template and still use a lot of different texts, videos and before/after slider images for each product? I know I can use metafields to a certain extend but are there catalog management apps that can simplify the process? 

[PaulNewton]

Hi @midger  if alternate templates and dynamic sources are not enough flexibility to address specific information architecture needs

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/os20/theme-structure/templates#create-a-new-t...

https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/theme-structure/sections-and-blocks#metafield...

Then that's where either landing page apps/services, or advanced theme customizations come in.

There's also CMS services likes storyblock for components, or contentful, builder.io , sanity, etc, generally for headless situations though.

But with any of those there can still be alot of initial setup and business logic to think through to get future productivity gains.

Also in some scenarios see metaobject webpages https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/custom-data/metaobjects/webpages 

Merchants that need advanced theme customizations to manage content efficiently can contact me for services.
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[rm-philmells]

Using an app to do this will almost always introduce performance issues as it will inject frontend code, often causing cumulative layout shift, JS load time issues, render-blocking amongst a host of other potential problems. Shopify apps already have a big issue with this kind of thing on the frontend (and so should be absolutely avoided whenever possible), though it's mostly to do with Shopify's app architecture rather than the apps themselves.

It's annoying to set up at first but creating a single template with the appropriate metafields, metaobjects and conditionals is the right way to do this. You can use the liquid "case" to iterate through things, and you can use blocks and snippets if you've got reusable combinations of content types. If you need to create reusable variations where you need to order these blocks/sections, you can work this out with a metaobject and/or metafield that stores the layout order for a product. This can then be manipulated in liquid to control the display.