Allow staff to edit the unpublished themes but prevent them from editing the published theme

[rbhsiags]

Or to change the published theme (that is, publish another theme). In other words, I would like the staff to be able to modify the "development" themes but not the "production" theme (which is the published theme). Likewise, I would like to prevent the staff from changing the published theme.

[Elias]

Hey, @rbhsiags.

Thank you for reaching out and posting this question.

You can edit the staff permissions and allow or disallow your staff to access Themes. However, there isn't a way to set this permission selectively for published or unpublished themes at the moment. However, I can see how important this function is to you, and I'd be happy to share this suggestion as a feature request with our development team. If Shopify moves forward with any new features or platform changes, then we'll be sure to announce them on the Shopify Changelog.

If you have any other questions on this topic, don't hesitate to let me know!

[APStudio]

Just ran into this too and it would be great to have "unpublishable" themes. Eg. a "staging" theme where we can roll out bug fixes and test content, but that can't be published live.

[Mac]

Hi, @APStudio!

Thank you for sharing your feedback. I will make sure to pass on these details to our developers for their consideration. One way to mitigate this could be to rename the theme file to clearly differentiate it as a staging theme that should not be published. Any updates will be communicated through our changelog.

[APStudio]

Thanks @Mac , we're using GIT and themes are already named after their production and staging branch. It's too easy to click Publish instead of Save in the Editor at the moment with the two buttons side by side.

[Mac]

Hi again, @APStudio!

I appreciate the additional context. I have added that to the feature request ticket. Thanks again for your valuable feedback. 

[Avey]

I think it would also be beneficial to be able to allow staff/collaborator permissions to only particular members, so that they aren't able to edit any of the other themes, and could have multiple staff/collaborators working on different themes according to when you want to use them throughout the year. I'm toying with the idea of setting this up through subdomains tailored to individual staff accounts, and then see if I can import the them back to the main domain once it's set up the way that works.