Incomplete docs. How do I work on a theme that's currently active?

[bioball]

This is from the readme:

Edit and Preview Inactive Themes

In many cases you may want to work on a theme behind the scenes while your current theme is still active. To accomplish this there are two steps:

Utilize the theme preview option in your Shopify store. This is a built in feature of Shopify outside the scope of Shopify theme. You can find your theme ID by looking at the URL:

Where are the two steps? I only see one, and it's kinda vague.

[csaunders]

If the theme_id is absent you'll be performing your actions against the active theme.

[bioball]

What if it is present? Can I perform actions against an active theme without actually changing it live in production?

[csaunders]

You mean modify a production theme without seeing the changes immediately
on your shop?

No. If you want to do that you'll need to duplicate the theme and do your
updates against that one. Once you are ready, swap the themes.

On Wed, Oct 14, 2015 at 7:55 PM, Daniel Chao notifications@github.com
wrote:

What if it is present? Can I perform actions against an active theme
without actually changing it live in production?

—
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub
#173 (comment)
.

Chris Saunders // Developer @ Shopify

[bioball]

Gotcha, thanks @csaunders. I just realized that the mistake that there is a typo in your docs. The sentence should read:

"In many cases you may want to work on a theme behind the scenes while your current theme is still inactive:"

[csaunders]

There isn't a typo in the docs. We are misunderstanding each other.

Most people don't want changes to happen to their actual storefront when doing development. In those cases merchants/developers should duplicate the theme and perform their changes against that one instead (you can view that theme by typing theme open).

[bioball]

Hm, ok. I'd suggest an addendum to the docs. Something like:

In many cases you may want to work on a theme behind the scenes while your current theme is still active. To accomplish this, you will need to duplicate the theme, and make your changes to that duplicated theme.

Utilize the theme preview option in your Shopify store to see your changes. This is a built in feature of Shopify outside the scope of Shopify theme. You can find your theme ID by looking at the URL:

(bolded the addendum stuff)

[juleskuehn]

Bioball, I understand what you are saying, but your change to the docs support only a single use case - modifying an active theme. It's worth considering a rewrite though.

In many cases you may want to work on a theme behind the scenes while your current theme is still active. For instance, to safely modify your current theme, duplicate the theme and edit that one.

To edit an inactive theme, you must enter its theme_id in config.yml. To find your theme ID, open the online HTML editor. The last (numerical) portion of the URL is the theme ID.

(The preview link does show the theme_id anymore - at least in dev stores)

[bioball]

Ok yup, those changes sound good to me too.