Shopify’s New Features Narrow the Gap with WordPress & WooCommerce
Shopify had their annual Shopify United conference last week and they announced some major features that are serious game-changers on the development side.
The upcoming custom post type equivalent in Shopify
As a developer who builds custom projects on both platforms, there’s usually always a discussion of which way to take an e-commerce project and it often came down to the amount of content being the deciding factor.
See, Shopify is excellent at e-commerce. However, in the content department, they’ve always majorly lagged behind WordPress in content management outside of the store. In WordPress, custom post types give you the freedom to create numerous content pieces and make them super easy to manage. So if you had a small site where the store was the main focus, perfect fit for Shopify. A large, content-heavy site? Making all that content as easy to manage as building it on WordPress would be next to impossible.
At Shopify Unite 2021, Shopify announced it will soon be rolling out the ability to create custom content types, which are essentially a custom post type (CPT) equivalent in WordPress.
This. Is. Huge.
When building a site in WordPress, custom post types are utilized all the time, at least in my own builds. Testimonials? Custom post type. Team members? Custom post type. Press items? Custom post type. So many content types are so much easier to manage going that route. When trying to mentally map out how to execute these same pieces in Shopify, you were maybe forced to lean towards apps or sections or similar. It just wasn’t as straightforward as it could be.
Custom content types will majorly open up how viable it is to build content-heavy sites in Shopify, not to mention make it much less painful on the developer side.
But wait, there’s more!
Improved metafields support in Shopify is also here
In what Shopify is calling Online Store 2.0, Shopify is making major improvements to custom fields, making developers no longer have to hardcore each field in the theme.
Custom fields and custom post types go hand in hand when building any project in WordPress so either not having those comparably at all or having a much less efficient version was a major con whenever choosing to build a project in Shopify.
These two changes make building custom Shopify themes to support content-heavy sites with a store much more viable.
Additional developer quality of life changes
While custom content types and better metafields support are the two changes that got me the most excited, Shopify is making other exciting changes that impact Shopify developers. Their new Git integration and custom starter theme are also huge pluses for developers. You can read more about all the exciting changes announced at Shopify Unite on the Shopify blog.
Want to talk custom Shopify development?
If you’re considering a Shopify project and want to talk about custom Shopify theme development, especially with these changes making Shopify development life a whole lot better, I’d love to chat! Let’s work together to bring it to life. Let’s start a conversation!