Hello, I need a little help understanding themes and the connection to apps.
If I install a new theme to work on, but don’t publish it, does it affect the live site at all? Does anything happen to the 3rd party app connections for the live site? Can I test the connection with my 3rd party apps before publishing?
When you install a new theme are the 3rd party apps already connected with that new theme and copy of your site? When you publish the new theme, do the 3rd party app connections continue and work if I change themes? If they aren’t connected or don’t work, can you roll back your site and have the previous version work with the 3rd party apps without any issues or coding?
Great questions. When you add a new theme to your store it goes into your theme library, which you can find just under your published theme. You will have one published theme that people can see when they visit your website, and customers will not be able to see your additional themes in your library. When you make edits to your theme in the store editor, you are only editing that one specific theme. Having those additional themes doesn’t affect your current published theme, and your unpublished ones don’t affect your published theme.
When you add apps to your theme, most of them you’ll be able to connect to your store editor and you can enable them into your site. When you open your editor, on the left side of the screen it will display the different sections you can make edits in. The bottom one is App Embeds, it will look like this:
You will find any app embeds in that section and you can toggle the enable button to have it show in the current theme you’re editing.
This means you can have certain apps enabled in some of your themes, and disabled in others. If you were to change the theme you have published, you can simply toggle the enable button in your store editor and you’re done. There are some apps that require you to manually install coding yourself, for those ones you would just have to manually install the coding into the new theme you want to use.
Having multiple themes will not affect your published theme, and even when you make coding changes, you are only editing one theme code at a time. If you switch your published theme and change your mind for any reason, you can just change your published theme again.
I hope that answers those questions for you, but let me know if you have more.
Hi Kitana, thank you for your reply! It’s really helpful. I have another question, if I use the app on the first theme, and then I republish another theme and enable the app on both themes, will the app charge me twice?
