I don’t know if I’m the only dev that feels this way, but it’s EXTREMELY frustrating that you guys launched this new “developer preview” without any way to actually USE it. Sure, we can look at the raw templates, but how is the new content handled? If we can’t use the theme editor, how are we supposed to test content in the site? Without being able to use it, I haven’t been able to grasp what these new changes you “rolled-out” almost 6 months ago actually mean. And all we get is “later this year!” Well it’s December, and my company is growing and has big plans for next year. I’m really hesitant to develop anything new, only to find out that everything has changed. But obviously “later this year” isn’t working out, so will it now become “sometime next year”? With the random new info you’ve given us, it’s impossible to plan for the future.
On a grander scale, this has been a recurring frustration of mine with Shopify. You guys seem so excited to launch new things that you don’t actually finish them before you do. This new Unite 2019 is only the latest example.
You guys launched metafields a few years ago, but incredibly didn’t give us a native GUI to actually manage them. There was a very tone-deaf blog post you guys posted soon after, titled something like “The Secret Metafield Editor You Wish You Knew About”, which walked you through the super convoluted and complicated way you can manage all your metafields by sending them through a query string to a hidden page in the backend. I see it’s been pulled down, so I assume that you finally realized that a “secret” editor wasn’t actually something to be proud of. Now your docs just say that we need to install a 3rd-party app to manage metafields, or build your own API proxi. Unfinished.
Then, you guys launched the very buggy script editor, which on the surface sounds like an amazing thing. Until you realize that it’s super janky, throws generic random errors (only in production) that are impossible to troubleshoot, and you can only run ONE script at a time, making your actual published script a behemoth of new and old code that you just pray will somehow hold it together. I was once told by your dev support a while back that, “Well, it’s still technically in beta, so there are things we still need to work out”. Unfinished.
There are a lot of things Shopify does well, mainly on the shopping cart side, but I really wish there was more of a commitment to finishing big updates before you launch them. At least finish them at some point. It’s hard to get excited about the new theme environment when we’re having to wait so long for any real, tangible updates. I really wish you’d just waited til next year to announce it, when you actually had something that works. Honestly, we might move our front-end off Shopify before we get to see it. Your CMS in it’s current state just doesn’t hold up, and I don’t have a lot of confidence in what you have coming.
Again… Maybe it’s just me.
but it seems very convoluted and unnecessary when you can so easily tell whether there is a section or not. If for some reason you wanted to disable the feature without removing sections, then reuse the setting in “Page settings” and call it “Disable this page’s sections support”. I think it’s pretty obvious that disabling this feature when sections exist is absolutely an edge case and will not be the norm.