@by-association-only/slate-sections-plugin

The plugin allows developers to create Shopify theme sections from a variety of files contained in a folder, and combines these files into a single Liquid section file for use on Shopify servers.

Getting Started

First install the plugin

npm install @by-association-only/slate-sections-plugin --save-dev

or

yarn add @by-association-only/slate-sections-plugin --dev

Then add it to your webpack config, an example below.

const SlateSectionsPlugin = require('@by-association-only/slate-sections-plugin');

const slateSectionsOptions = {
  from: '/absolute/path/to/sections/source',
  to: '/absolute/path/to/sections/output',
};

module.exports = {
  plugins: [new SlateSectionsPlugin({slateSectionsOptions})],
};

Options

Option	Required?	Type	Default	Description
from	Yes	String	undefined	The absolute path to the folder containing your sections, typically ./src/sections
to	Yes	String	undefined	The absolute path to the folder where your sections will be outputted to, typically ./dist/sections
genericTemplateName	No	String	'template.liquid'	If you're using the 'Sections as Folders' structure, your template names by default need to be 'template.liquid'. You may change this value if you would like to.

Sections as Liquid Files

You may structure your sections folder by creating separate Liquid files for each section:

./sections
├── blog-posts.liquid
├── collection-list.liquid
├── featured-collection.liquid
├── featured-product.liquid
├── footer.liquid
├── header.liquid
├── image-with-text.liquid
├── newsletter.liquid
├── product.liquid
└── rich-text.liquid

This structure simply tells the plugin to copy the Liquid files into the ./dist sections folder

Sections as Folders

You can separate a schema from your Liquid template by creating a folder for each section. This increases maintainability and provides syntax highlighting for your JSON schema objects.

In order to have separate schema files, you must create a folder for the section and within that folder create a template.liquid file which will take the same name as the directory it will live in. You may optionally create a schema.json file containing the section's settings, which will be appended to the Liquid template inside of {% schema %} tags.

Example

./sections/article-template
├── schema.json
└── template.liquid

This will create an article-template.liquid with the contents of the template.liquid file and with JSON wrapped in {% schema %} tags, which will be copied over to the ./dist sections folder.

Translations

If you need settings in your schema that require multiple translations, you can specify this by doing the following:

{
  "name": {
    "de": "Posts",
    "en": "Posts",
    "es": "Publicaciones",
    "fr": "Articles",
    "it": "Articoli",
    "ja": "投稿",
    "pt-BR": "posts"
  },
  "settings": [
    {
      "type": "checkbox",
      "id": "image_parallax",
      "label": {
        "de": "Parallax-Animation für Bild anzeigen",
        "en": "Show image parallax animation",
        "es": "Mostrar animación de paralaje de imagen",
        "fr": "Afficher l'animation en parallaxe",
        "it": "Mostra animazione parallasse immagine",
        "ja": "画像のパララックスアニメーションを表示する",
        "pt-BR": "Exibir animação de paralaxe da imagem"
      }
    }
  ]
}

However, as the number of theme languages add up over time, and when you have many settings that require translations, this can result in a very large JSON file which becomes difficult to maintain. This plugin allows you to separate the translations into separate locale files allowing for easier maintainability for your theme's translations.

First you specify the schema's structure in schema.json:

{
  "name": {
    "t": "name"
  },
  "settings": [
    {
      "type": "checkbox",
      "id": "image_parallax",
      "label": {
        "t": "settings.image_parallax.label"
      }
    }
  ]
}

For every key with multiple translations you specify an object with a t key and its value is the key to retrieve the translation from a different JSON object as the one shown below. You would have a translation object such as the one below for every language you would like to support:

{
  "name": "Posts",
  "settings": {
    "image_parallax": {
      "label": "Show image parallax animation",
      "info": "Only shows on desktop"
    }
  }
}

The plugin will take care of combining all the translations into an object such as the one displayed initially. To specify the locale code of your JSON file, you must name it [localecode].json

Below is an example of what your section's folder may look like:

./sections/article-template
├── locales
│   ├── de.json
│   ├── en.json
│   ├── es.json
│   ├── fr.json
│   ├── it.json
│   ├── ja.json
│   └── pt-BR.json
├── schema.json
└── template.liquid

This will all get combined and outputted into a single article-template.liquid.