Section groups
Definition
Section groups are JSON files that let a theme's header, footer and aside regions be composed in the theme editor. A group file lists sections and their settings, and the layout renders the group by name. Unlike a template, a group appears on every page that renders it, so what a merchant changes there changes site-wide.
Documented at https://shopify.dev/docs/storefronts/themes/architecture/section-groups.
How we've used it
The group is the reason global components stopped being hard-coded. A footer built as a group is a handful of merchant-editable blocks — menu columns bound to real Shopify menus, a newsletter capture, a bottom bar with legal links and market selectors — and its information architecture can be reordered without a deploy. The constraint that shapes the work is that a group can't be duplicated: there's one header and one footer, and every market and every sub-brand shares them. So divergence goes one of two ways. Wording differences move into a market context file. Behavioral differences stay in the section, gated by a predicate — an announcement block that renders only on the pages of one sub-brand, for instance.
Builds using it
- Adults/Kids audience-switching header with automatic menu swap — LUS Brands
- Detached mobile drawer with three-level native-details navigation — LUS Brands
- Mega-menu header with separate mobile menu and image blocks — Three Ships
- Tabbed mobile Shop menu with featured banner panel — Three Ships
Related entities
Section context files · Theme sections · Theme architecture · JSON templates