Link product & blog posts by blog post metafield

Technical Q&A

Topic summary

Goal: Show on product pages the blog posts (recipes) that reference those products, using a blog article metafield of type Product List (a metafield is a custom data field; Product List stores product references).

Constraints: 500+ articles require a reverse lookup (product ā†’ articles). Shopify lacks an article/blog reference metafield type, and Shopify Flow canā€™t trigger on new articles.

Approaches considered:

  • Liquid (Shopifyā€™s templating language) nested loops over all articles and each articleā€™s product-list metafield to find matches; possible but likely too slow at this scale.
  • Put related article handles in a product metafield (e.g., list of strings) and render server-side via articles[ā€˜blog-handle/article-handleā€™]; efficient at render time but creates manual upkeep whenever new posts are published.
  • Build automation/app to sync: watch for new articles and copy relationships into product metafields; could be a private Rails app or a noā€‘code workflow with Make. Hiring a Shopify Expert is also suggested.

Current direction: Moving toward a custom/private app to leverage existing blog metafield data while avoiding manual updates.

Open questions: Whether a GraphQL (API query language) query can fetch articles by a product referenced in a metafield (potentially for Mechanic or a custom app) remains unanswered. A brief Liquid snippet was shared for article-by-handle access.

Summarized with AI on January 24. AI used: gpt-5.
1

Hello, each of our 500+ blog posts has a metafield for related products. The metafield type is a Product List.

I want to use this blog post metafield data to be able to show the blog posts on the page for their related products.

Is there a way to do this?

  1. Loop through all blog articles and check the metafield?
  2. Query blog posts somehow in a Liquid template?
  3. Create own app?
2

Hey, @spicemerchant

This does sound like custom app territory as I havenā€™t come across an existing app that does this. Iā€™m confident one of our Shopify experts would be able to accomplish this at a reasonable price.

Just wanted to share this as an option in case you are unable to find a coding solution in your thread.

If there is anything else I can help you with, please let me know.

3

Thanks for the fast reply, Dirk!

Is there a GraphQL query to get blog posts by product in a metafield? If so I might be able to do this with Mechanic.

Or with my own appā€¦ Iā€™m a rails and js developer as well. Just need a good starting point.

4

So, what you want to do is suggest related blog articles in product pages right?

There is a way to loop over all blog articles in your product page, and then for each blog article loop over the product list metafields to see if there is a match. The main issue with this approach is that it is a nested loop startegy, knowing that you have 500+ articlesā€¦ There is a trick to achieve this using pagination (not tried for awhile but I think this can work) ; but to be frank, this is taking the problem from the wrong end, and is not a great idea for performance.

Since what you need to modify is the product page, could you not add a metafield in your product page instead of blog page? This metafield would be a list of related blog articles for your product.

Shopify is known for doing some things halfway, and I have no idea why there is not a blog or article reference available in metafields. So until this becomes a thing, you could still create a metafields of type ā€œsingle line texteā€ with ā€œlist of valuesā€ option. And for each product, you would add the articles ā€œhandleā€ that you want.

You can access a blog article in product page by its handle like this (here Iā€™m assuming there is only one blog):

{%- assign article = articles['blog-handle/article-handle'] -%} 
{{ article.title }}

Of course this code snippet would need to be adjusted to retrieve the article handles from the product metafield, but you get the idea.

5

Thanks Max. Iā€™ve considered that, but we donā€™t want the work flow of updating multiple productsā€™ metafields every time we have a new blog post. The management will be unwieldy.

I think weā€™ll need to make a custom app. The data already exists in Shopify so itā€™s a matter of getting it out.

6

You will still need to figure out how you render the blog post articles in your product pages. If you want the blog articles to be rendered server-side, using product metafields seems like a good approach (as I explained above).

I guess your app could be watching for when new articles are created, and create/migrate metafields data to the product metafield. By the way this can be done in a quick fashion using a ā€œno-codeā€ tool such as Make (Shopify Flow does not support yet watching for new articles).

1 Like
7

I might try that! Right now, if I could get the Rails private app workingā€¦ this app itself will be really straightforward. :slightly_smiling_face:

8

Just curious, what kind of related blog posts are you showing on the product pages? Is that a way of driving traffic to the blog posts, or are they specifically relevant to those products? Sounds pretty cool.

9

We have recipes featuring food products, so want the product pages to link to the specific recipes that use them, without creating extra work to go link/unlink outside of setting the product list metafield on the recipe. Thanks!

10

Anyone knows the point of the blog post metafield under products? I added a metafield for blog posts, selected blog posts per product, but the theme editor does not show ā€œblog postsā€ as an option in dynamic sourcing.