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Feature

Customising a Shopify theme without touching code

Every section explains itself, the ones with more than one sensible shape let you pick, and controls that cannot apply are not shown. Measured from the build, not claimed.

What is Theme editor?

Shopify's theme editor is the drag-and-drop screen where a merchant builds their storefront from a theme's sections and blocks. What differs between themes is not how many settings there are, but whether the editor tells you what each one does and hides the ones that cannot apply to what you have set up.

The number every theme quotes, and why it is the wrong one

Theme listings compete on how many settings they have. It is an easy number to grow and it makes the product worse: a control that duplicates another one, or that applies to a configuration you are not in, still counts. The merchant pays for it in a panel they scroll past.

So this page quotes three different numbers, all of them read out of the build rather than typed into a sales page.

Every section says what it is for — 44 of 44

Shopify has no section description field. There is no description, nothing at the root of a section's schema — the only place a section can explain itself to the person inserting it is a paragraph pinned to the top of its settings panel.

Most themes leave it empty and explain the section in a code comment, which is visible to somebody who opens the code editor and to nobody else. Here it is a build gate: a section without that paragraph, or with it below the controls where nobody reads it, fails the build. 44 of 44, and it cannot drift, because the check counts the sections it examined and that count is not allowed to fall.

Sections with more than one shape offer the choice — 10 of them

A preset is the starting shape you get when you insert a section. Nearly every theme gives each section exactly one, so inserting it hands you an empty box and a column of settings.

10 sections here offer more than one, 45 presets in total:

  • Collapsible contentFAQ
  • Collection listTwo categories
  • Comparison tableUs versus them
  • Featured collectionEditorial row
  • Icon barTrust badges, Feature grid
  • Image bannerHero banner, Centred banner, Wide strip
  • Logo listAs seen in, Payment marks
  • MultirowSlideshow, Image with text, Collage, Product features
  • TabsSpecifications, Questions
  • TestimonialsSingle quote

The section's own name is left off each line above: every section has a plain starting preset called after itself, and these are the shapes offered beside it.

The Multirow entry is the one that shows what this is worth. Slideshow is not a different set of default values; it seeds a four-level nesting tree — rows, containers, columns, and the blocks inside them — in one click. Building it by hand is several minutes of dragging, and knowing that it can be built that way is the part a settings list never tells you.

  • A full-width image banner with a heading and a button over the photograph
    Image banner — one of its four shapes
  • A row of tabs with a panel of text below the selected one
    Tabs — Specifications and Questions are presets of the same section

Controls that cannot apply are not shown — 94 conditions

Shopify lets a theme say show this setting only when that one is set. It is barely used, and the reason it matters is not tidiness.

A setting that is visible and inert is worse than one that is missing. You change it, nothing happens, and the honest conclusion from where you are sitting is that the theme is broken. Some concrete ones:

  • Add a Featured collection section and it asks you which collection. Only that. The other eleven settings — how many products, how many columns, image shape, badges, quick add — appear once there is a collection for them to describe.
  • Leave the free-shipping threshold at zero, which is where it starts, and the three settings that configure the progress bar are not there.
  • Turn scroll animations off in Theme settings, and the six controls that configure animation go with them, across every section.
  • Set a shadow's opacity to zero — where all four of them start — and its offset and blur controls go away rather than sitting there describing a shadow that is not being drawn.

94 conditions in the apparel-pro build. Every one of them is checked at build time against the settings it names, the values it compares against, and the scope it is written in — because a condition that quietly refers to nothing hides a control for ever, and reads exactly like the feature being missing.

What this does not claim

It does not claim more settings than anyone else. It does not claim you will never need the code editor. And none of the three numbers above is a promise about your store — they describe a build, they are regenerated from that build every time this site is deployed, and if a preset is removed from the theme it disappears from this page without anybody editing it.

That last property is the only one worth arguing about. Everything else here is a design decision you can check by installing the theme and opening the editor.

Which edition

Both. Core's editor behaves exactly the same way over fewer sections; the pricing page lists which artefacts each edition contains, generated from the theme's own build.

Questions people actually ask

Do I need to know code to customise this theme?

No. Everything on this page is the theme editor: sections, blocks and settings, dragged and typed. The theme's files are yours and you may edit them — the licence permits it and the update mechanism is built to survive it — but nothing described here requires it.

How many settings does the theme have?

That is the wrong number and we will not compete on it. A theme wins a settings count by shipping controls that duplicate each other or do nothing, and the merchant pays for it in a panel they cannot read. What is worth counting is how many controls are visible when they cannot apply, and that number is going down on purpose.

What is a preset, and why does it matter?

A preset is a starting shape for a section. Most themes give each section exactly one, so inserting it hands you an empty box. Here the sections that genuinely have more than one shape offer the choice at the point of insertion — the Multirow section's Slideshow preset builds a four-level nesting tree in a single click, which is several minutes of dragging otherwise.

Why do some settings disappear while I am editing?

Because they cannot apply. Set a section's free-shipping threshold to zero and the three settings that configure the bar go away; turn scroll animations off in Theme settings and the six knobs that configure them go with it. Shopify supports this and most themes barely use it. A control that is visible and inert is worse than a missing one — you change it, nothing happens, and you conclude the theme is broken.

Which edition is this?

Both. Every property described here is a property of how the theme is built rather than a feature that can be withheld — Core's editor behaves the same way over fewer sections.