Upgrade process

[bakura10]

Hi,

Michael from Maestrooo here.

We are starting to experiment with the new architecture as it seems to stabilize and see how everything can hook up on a real-life, complex theme.

However, one question that I have is how the upgrade process is supposed to work. For instance, when uploading a new theme version to the store, Shopify will reject it if it contains some BC changes (such as a change of a limit, the removal of some blocks...).

With an upgrade such as flex sections, everything will need to be re-written and re-architectured, making it impossible for merchants to upgrade to a theme block-powered theme.

How exactly will it work? Will the theme store allow theme developers to push a new version even if it contains breaking change? How Shopify will manage the automatic upgrade in this situation?

We had a lot of problem when we migrated our theme to color scheme (Shopify was copy-pasting old settings to a new version, which caused ton of breaks) and we would like to avoid this in the future.

[benjaminsehl]

We hear you. This is something we’ve been thinking a lot about and will be actively working on improving

Migrations where there are massive changes will be a real challenge of course, it’s one thing to make the upgrade process better account for updates of code within the same general structure of a theme, it’s another to account for moving from Section Blocks to Theme Blocks.

The options right now for existing themes are essentially:

• Introduce new sections with blocks, alongside your existing sections
• Merchants upgrade as a “clean slate” and need to rebuild their templates.

Obviously neither option here is ideal. We see Theme Blocks at launch of course being easiest for net new themes.

[JennyMcMillen]

Jenny from Eight Themes here.

Glad to hear it's being considered as we do struggle looking at ways to improve the theme but feeling locked into settings before the update path was introduced.

An example for us is also color schemes, we can't really update to use them without forcing manual updates which bring in a flurry of negative reviews. We did an update earlier this year and our support team are still having support debt around it and we also have negative reviews which mean more than ever now.

We have a backlog of improvements we'd like to make but are being held back due to it triggering a manual update so if there is a way to improve this it would definitely improve the products we're offering.