Is Shopify theme developer experience the Internet Explorer of today?

[vfonic]

I'm appalled by the state of the development of Shopify theme development tools. Every year or so there's a new tool that comes out from Shopify and then, six months later, it gets deprecated. I've seen this happen over and over again.

Don't get me wrong. I'm in awe of the people who work at Shopify. I think these people are smarter and more capable in terms of software development than I'll ever be. I just can't understand what is it that makes the team release undocumented software or simply deprecate something mid-work?

There's no need to reinvent the wheel. I know there's Storefront API. People will build GatsbyJS + Storefront API sites, and that's great. But in the meantime, huge amount of stores is and will stay on liquid themes and jQuery. Let's wrap that story up first?

Wouldn't it be great to have an issue saying "Thank you!" instead of this one?
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I haven't seen any.
On the other hand, I've seen many similar issues to this one.

Here are some highlights that I wouldn't enjoy reading if I worked at a company X:
"i just read the readme that shopify is putting slate on low maintenance. I am in the middle of developing a new theme for a client. Does not make me happy.

Is there any other official Dev tool-kit shopify supports?
There is not a clear documentation out there. At least i cannot find it." (Apr 3 2019) link
"Seems absurd that Shopify doesn't have the resources to maintain their core/default theme toolkit." (May 7 2019) link
"As a developer brand new to Shopify, I want to make a simple theme from scratch. And I am so confused right now" (Jun 14 2019) link
"it is pretty lame the position Shopify took here"* (Jul 5 2019) link * taken out of context
"Developing for Shopify is a terrible experience."
"I now push all my potential clients to other e-commerce platforms, and if they insist on Shopify, I charge an extra fee for the trouble."
"I honestly think the only reason Shopify has gotten away with their horrible developer experience is that they used to have a generous affiliate program. Now, they just have market share. If you can use any other platform at all, do it." (Aug 19 2019) link
"this is really disappointing, developing for Shopify is horrid at times. The JS Buy SDK has terrible documentation, slate is having countless bugs." (Nov 15 2019) link
"Also looking for some updates here" (19 days ago, still no reply)
"I just go through this repo. I see a lot of issues have been closed and conversation has been locked by bot while it is not address or fixed yet." (Jan 17 2019) link
"I'm new to Shopify theme development. What is the recommend way of working with existing stores?" (Mar 10 2019, still no reply) link
"We haven't really documented the migration process from v0 to v1"* (Jan 4 2019) *taken out of context link

I'm not even gonna go in the topic of Shopify App development or Shopify community forums.

I also ranted on twitter: https://twitter.com/vfonic/status/1219582692548890625

So what's the current recommended tools by Shopify for theme development - one huge aspect of Shopify platform?

/sorry for the rant, that's just how I feel every time when I have to work on Shopify projects. I feel it's one of the best e-commerce platforms out there with incredible engineering team. I just feel like third-party developer experience is not one of the company's priorities, sadly.

/cc @t-kelly (I found your work on slate impressive! Maybe you can give us some insights?)

[drinkmorewaters]

Hey, i am referenced in there, and rightfully so, developing for Shopify is horrid! Every day i work on a particular theme, and i sit and wait 146 seconds for a build, why? Because yarn start/yarn watch destroys the theme. So only yarn deploy works. 146 * 20-30 pushes. 73 Minutes of waiting on 30 pushes. Just absolutely terrible. No end in site for this madness, the theme is now built upon Slate and it's going to be utterly unmaintainable at some stage.

[dan-gamble]

Hey, i am referenced in there, and rightfully so, developing for Shopify is horrid! Every day i work on a particular theme, and i sit and wait 146 seconds for a build, why? Because yarn start/yarn watch destroys the theme. So only yarn deploy works. 146 * 20-30 pushes. 73 Minutes of waiting on 30 pushes. Just absolutely terrible. No end in site for this madness, the theme is now built upon Slate and it's going to be utterly unmaintainable at some stage.

Don't want to derail this but can't you duplicate that theme and use yarn start on that one? We typically set up stores with 3 themes. Live, Staging & Dev.

We develop on the dev version. yarn deploy to staging when done so the client can test the changes. Then ones that's done we'll merge the changes into master and this auto deploys to the live.

I think some of the points in here are valid but this process may be able to help you in this regard.

[drinkmorewaters]

Hey, i am referenced in there, and rightfully so, developing for Shopify is horrid! Every day i work on a particular theme, and i sit and wait 146 seconds for a build, why? Because yarn start/yarn watch destroys the theme. So only yarn deploy works. 146 * 20-30 pushes. 73 Minutes of waiting on 30 pushes. Just absolutely terrible. No end in site for this madness, the theme is now built upon Slate and it's going to be utterly unmaintainable at some stage.

Don't want to derail this but can't you duplicate that theme and use yarn start on that one? We typically set up stores with 3 themes. Live, Staging & Dev.

We develop on the dev version. yarn deploy to staging when done so the client can test the changes. Then ones that's done we'll merge the changes into master and this auto deploys to the live.

I think some of the points in here are valid but this process may be able to help you in this regard.

By duplicate, do you mean to another theme within Shopify and change the ID of theme and push to that instead? No, doesn't work. Doesn't work on any new theme and yes we have staging setup but this is not a setup process, it's the build tool that's breaking it. If it was that easy, it would have been fixed.

Today the JS code broke again, as we write a new function, randomly the split chunking will fail and we have to revert back and move the JS files outside of the chunking. Then when we did that, the build step failed for a separate issue. The other day Vue was throwing errors left right and center and we found that the webpack/slate build process was randomly removing chunks of code.

These issues are because bugs arise and Slate has 0 maintenance and Shopify isn't providing any guideline on what tooling works best for their setup. It isn't one issue... Let's not derail the discussion though, Shopify has a history of poor open source support, poor documentation and EOL products that are used by thousands without notice. They've killed all the theme development tools they've made. People need something that works.

Let's also not forget that 'slater' is arguably better than Slate, and is practically handled by one developer, but a multi billion dollar enterprise wasn't able to afford 1 developer to maintain a development tool-set?!

[drinkmorewaters]

Well, it's dead! Shopify, you really hate your developers. You dragged on for 6-12 months, to drop support at the last minute. Of which, everyone saw coming, because, it's you, Shopify. The churn and burn tool set people! No one at Shopify thought, it might be a good idea to get tooling prepared for the launch of the new sections paradigm?

5ecc510

[ScottJr]

I don't think the analogy of Internet Explorer is correct, more Microsoft. Back in the day Microsoft was built by partners that brought customers to them to buy licenses. Shopify has the same relationship with devs/agencies. Like Microsoft back in the day, Shopify has a huge portion of potential revenue pulled away from them by their Partners - both direct services and apps. You can bet behind the scenes they are trying to shift that over to their pockets now that they have built themselves up on the back of us. Why do you think Shopify is so slowly trickling out changes to the Storefront API that will make a meaningful impact on dev workflow? They just released the cart and the account pages for dynamic sections to us?