How to use child theme of shopify free theme

[msdocuments]

If I want to change css then is there opportunity to use child theme of DAWN? How to use that child theme?

[PageFly-Richard]

First Answer

I’m Richard Nguyen - CRO Expert at PageFly- Free Landing Page Builder.

Hi  MSdocument About the child theme you are talking about, there is also a similar function about shopifly that is "Duplicate" and you can see the tutorial or video link here: https://help.shopify.com/en/manual/online-store/themes/managing-themes/duplicating-themes

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c9NXXhU1g7I

to follow the instructions, have a nice day.

If you feel my answer is helpful, dlike it or mark it as a solution. Let me know if you have any questions.

Best regards,

Richard | PageFly

[msdocuments]

Hi Richard,

Thank you for your reply of my post. So, before making any change it should make duplicate copy of any original theme. But I have changed many things of DAWN without making any duplicate copy. Now what is your advice?

After making duplicate copy will I use the duplicate copy or the original one?

[shayanabbas]

Hey @msdocuments Actually I guess what you are looking for is a solution similar to WordPress Child theme, Unfortunately Shopify haven't provided any solution uptil now which make it bit challenging to update/upgrade the Original theme in your case you are using DAWN theme, a way around to making child theme could be using GIT through which you will be able to maintain the theme code separately and upgrade as well once news updates has been pushed by DAWN theme git repo.

You can find the solution here for the above: https://safrazssears.medium.com/creating-a-theme-inheritance-boilerplate-structure-for-shopify-theme...

About the second part that you already have customized you original debut theme and now what you should do.

Only solution i can think of at the moment is that you should fork the DAWN theme (https://github.com/Shopify/dawn) and then good way is to create a branch in your newly created forked repo  based on the master branch and name the new branch something like, `theme/your-project-name` and then copy the current code of your theme which you have already edited and customized and past it in the new branch overwriting all the files and now commit it, so that you will have a separately branch for the edited version of the DAWN theme, till at this point if your DAWN theme is old you can also update your newly created branch with the DAWN theme updates with the way mentioned in the above link i mentioned in the start of this post. Now you just use the current branch as your main theme `theme/your-project-name` for your shopify store,

Note: The above is bit technically I am not sure about your experience with git, but how it works in shopify is that when you first start the store and use a theme, and when you want to make changes to the files of the shopify theme, you Duplicate it first and then do that changes in that theme and name the changes in the Duplicated theme name so that you can track what changes you have made and use the duplicated theme on wards, and next time when you again want to make changes. Update the Original DAWN theme or any theme you are using, and then again duplicate it and copy the changes from the previous theme + do the latest changes and name that duplicated name with the reference name mentioning the changes you made and use that as live theme and so on.