Platform Primitives
The Shopify mechanics the work rests on — the Section Rendering API, metafields, cart permalinks and the rest.
History API
The History API lets a page change the address bar without a navigation and be told when the browser moves back and forth through the entries it created. One call writes an entry, another replaces it, and a popstate event reports the movement. It's what makes a filtered, sorted or swapped view a link a shopper can send to someone.
2 builds
Intersection Observer API
The Intersection Observer API reports when an element enters or leaves the viewport, or another element, asynchronously and off the main thread. A callback receives only the entries that changed. It replaces scroll handlers that measure geometry on every frame, and it's the browser's answer to work that should happen because of where something is.
7 builds
JSON templates
A JSON template is a Shopify template written as data rather than as Liquid. It lists the sections on a page, their order, their settings and their blocks, and the theme editor writes it. Because the file is data, a merchant can recompose a page without a developer, and a section's settings can be bound to dynamic sources.
3 builds
Line-item properties
Line-item properties are key and value pairs attached to a cart line at the moment it's added. They travel with that line through checkout and onto the order, and keys beginning with an underscore stay on the record while staying hidden from the shopper. They are the only place a theme can put per-line data that Shopify has no field for.
3 builds
Liquid pagination
The `paginate` tag splits a collection, blog, search result or list into pages of a fixed size and exposes an object describing the ladder: the current position, the page links, and the next and previous pages. It runs on the server, so every page it produces is a real URL that renders with no JavaScript at all.
5 builds
Liquid section schema and settings
A section's schema is a JSON block declaring its name, its settings, its block types and where it's allowed to appear. Shopify renders those settings as theme-editor controls and hands the merchant's values back to the section at render time. It is the contract between the developer who writes a section and the person merchandising it.
277 builds
Liquid snippets
A snippet is a Liquid file rendered inside another file with the `render` tag, which gives it an isolated scope and named arguments. It carries no schema and no settings of its own. Snippets are how a theme keeps one implementation of a recurring thing, a product card, an image, a price, across every section that needs it.
9 builds
Metafields
Metafields are typed custom fields Shopify attaches to its own resources — products, variants, collections, pages, articles, customers, the shop itself. Each one has a namespace, a key and a declared type, and merchants edit them in the admin like any other field. They extend the data model without changing it, and themes and APIs read them wherever the parent resource is available.
85 builds
Metaobjects
Metaobjects are merchant-defined content types in Shopify's admin. A merchant declares a definition with typed fields, creates entries against it, and references those entries from products, collections or other metaobjects through metafields. They hold structured content that isn't a product — an ingredient, a routine step, a quiz question, a bundle rule — and themes read the entries at render time.
16 builds
Predictive Search API
The Predictive Search API is a Shopify storefront endpoint that returns type-ahead results for a partial query. A theme requests `/search/suggest` and receives matching products, collections, pages, articles and query suggestions, either as JSON or as a rendered section, with the resource types and result limits set per request. It powers the dropdown that appears while a shopper is still typing.
7 builds