I am looking at switching to a new design for my store. Currently I am using the Trade theme. I am looking at switching to Athens, Warehouse or another premium theme. I currently have probably 100 collection templates, that I use for sub-collections. Will I be able to export my current design as a zip and copy the templates over to the exported zip of the new design? The developers of one of the themes I am looking at, told me this would not be possible, and the files would not work.
Topic summary
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Goal: Migrate ~100 collection templates from the Trade theme to a new premium theme (e.g., Athens or Warehouse) by exporting both themes as ZIPs and copying template files.
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Feasibility: Not supported. Shopify theme codebases differ substantially across themes—and sometimes even across versions of the same theme—so templates, sections, and settings are not compatible.
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Reason: Section names/nomenclature, schema, and configuration differ, causing copied templates to break or be nonfunctional in the new theme.
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Outcome/next steps: Templates cannot be transferred; the collection page designs must be rebuilt using the new theme’s tools and sections.
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Status: Resolved with a definitive “no”; no alternative migration method or automated tool was proposed.
No, this is not possible.
The theme code is significantly different between themes (sometimes even between same theme versions!) and even section nomenclature, names and settings would be different.
Unfortunately, one would need to recreate the designs using tools provided by the new theme.
@HTX-Fluid-Power I’ve just re-visited your site.
Instead of creating multiple templates, it’s possible to to use a single template with custom coded section/part which will output those sub-collections.
Custom code can check your current collection and see if your main menu has sub-collections listed for the current collection. In this case it will output collection cards and suppress products display.
Yes, you’d need a dev to implement this, but you’ll save quite significant time during migration.
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@HTX-Fluid-Power it is not possible as themes differ in code, page structures, section settings and many more. Therefore exporting and importing templates will not work.
@daniel_0505 Can you provide some more detail on this method?