Assigning pages to template in unpublished theme

[calvinwho]

I am in the process of upgrading our website to a new 2.0 theme and all the pages/products now have their own templates.

Is there a way to assign these pages to their templates before setting the theme live? Or does anyone have a way of doing this smoothly once it's live?

I don't want to publish it and then have to quickly assign pages because there's a lot.

[jfarre383]

I am having the same issue as Calvinwho if anybody has a workaround to apply templates to pages in an unpublished theme?  Or @calvinwho  have you had any success?  

[AbrinT]

I’m having the same issue. @calvinwho @jfarre383 , were you ever able to figure this out?

[calvinwho]

No, I wasn't. I just launched the new theme during a quiet period and edited it when live. 

[jfarre383]

I haven't, likely just going to assign templates after publishing unless I
learn something otherwise (which would be preferred)!

[SingleSh0tBass]

Make sure both templates of each theme have the same page template name.

For example, Theme A has "how-it-works" page template, and on Theme B a new page template for "how-it-works" page has same page template name.

If you preview it using Theme B, you will see the Theme B's "how-it-works" template. Shopify will route to the same template name.

[eck]

That will not work when you have a very custom coded site that is not using templates for many of the pages and you want to migrate from custom sections/snippets and code to straight templates.  I've tried using page builders like Shogun with the same frustration, why can they only seem to edit the Published page? This is the opposite of what most website development does... Please tell me there is a better solution than this!