Slate Discontinued?

[reco]

Slate Discontinued?

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.

I would expect a toolkit which allows themes to be developed locally. Slate was the best i could find.

[reco]

i found slater https://slater-demo.myshopify.com. pretty impressive what these guys did put together.

https://slater-demo.myshopify.com
https://github.com/the-couch/slater

a lot faster and no ssl issues.

[ConduciveMammal]

@reco I've been assured from one of Shopify's engineers that Slate definitely isn't being discontinued, they've just had to reassign the Slate team to other areas of Shopify for the time being.

[niedfelj]

Seems absurd that Shopify doesn't have the resources to maintain their core/default theme toolkit.

[reco]

@ConduciveMammal definitely sounds like abandoning slate. anyhow slater is a really nice alternative! love it.

[gubbigubbi]

Tried slate a month ago it worked, tried ago a new config and it doesnt work, im moving to slater

[tomaszbujnowicz]

I can also recommend Slater. https://github.com/the-couch/slater
I am using it now for the new shop and although it's not perfect, it seems to be a solid starting point to get a new shop theme off the ground.
Hopefully, some issues will be fixed along the way.

[chryton]

@niedfelj Same goes for themekit, the old theme gem, timber, checkout scripts (seemingly at least), etc. The developer tooling for Shopify still isn't what it needs to be for agencies, stores, and freelancers.

[lmartins]

Well, if this isn't incomprehensible I don't know what is.

You can certainly understand the need to shift priorities, but halting the project altogether, and throwing all of those who have been investing on the workflow under the bus, feels disrespectful.

Way to go Shopify!

[mmontag]

Hi guys, here's a user story:

As a developer brand new to Shopify, I want to make a simple theme from scratch. And I am so confused right now

[lmartins]

@mmontag you should probably be worried, to some extent. At the very least this shows that Shopify doesn't see this project as a priority of any significance.

With that said, it currently works, and there are no major show stoppers that I can think of. There are also alternatives as stated above, so there's that.

Either Slate or the alternatives, everything is better than trying to setup a modern workflow in their editor, or with the previous upload scripts they had (theme kit or something like it).

[mmontag]

thanks @lmartins, I'll avoid Theme Kit, I guess. There are not many signposts out there for us wanderers

[kyu-song]

Wow, just discovered this... no notification email/updates to Partners? We use Slate every day across dozens of stores and it's been game-changing for us, allowing us to take on more clients, fix bugs and iterate quickly. Please do not abandon Slate.

[allthetime]

Hi guys, here's a user story:

As a developer brand new to Shopify, I want to make a simple theme from scratch. And I am so confused right now

@mmontag I've spent half a day and I don't feel any closer to a solution. Fired up slate on the shopify docs recommendation and nothing is going as expected. Did you come to any conclusions about what to use?

[lmartins]

@allthetime that is perhaps a little too vague for anyone to be able to help you. Slate does work, I use everyday as many do. Slater is another option which appears to work too, I haven't played enough with that one yet.
So while it is pretty lame the position Shopify took here, I think you still have options and both Slate and Slater should allow you to get going.

[GriffinJohnston]

@mmontag @allthetime - I'm late to this conversation, but I ran into it and had to respond. I was in your position a couple years ago. Having since gotten Slate up and running and successfully launched two iterations of a medium-sized e-commerce operation, I can say with confidence:

Developing for Shopify is a terrible experience.

Even after you have everything set up and working, it sucks. Compilation is incredibly slow (It actually has to upload assets to your dev store before you can see your changes. Nothing should work this way. It's a nightmare). There are weird gotchas and easy traps to fall into. Once a site is launched, it's awkward to set up a separate development site, and even more awkward pushing updates to the live site. 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.

[drinkmorewaters]

Just gonna tack on here and say that this is really disappointing, developing for Shopify is horrid at times. The JS Buy SDK has terrible documentation, slate is having countless bugs. We're having to use a free theme and hack it to bits to get it to work. Getting Vue to work seamlessly is not easy (Via CDN is fine, but then its practically not able to be modern Vue). Now slater is dead too. Best theme (timber) is about 4 years old.

Really wish it was more enjoyable.

It's obvious Shopify is redesigning its internal tooling and changing it's theming concepts for the drag drop editor, that's why they don't want to develop Slate as there is a (insert new theme name) coming in less than 12 months.

[laurens94]

@GriffinJohnston what platform would you recommend?

[koverda]

Any opinions on motifmate?

[GriffinJohnston]

@GriffinJohnston what platform would you recommend?

@laurens94 For more complex stores I haven't been able to avoid Shopify unfortunately. For smaller stores and payment integrations I've had success just using Stripe's APIs directly.

[aeu]

Also looking for some updates here

[sergejcodes]

Hi everybody 👋🏻.

If anyone is interested in a better Shopify developer experience with a modern workflow, you might want to check out Shopify Theme Lab. It may suit your needs.

I created the project to address the issue of not having a great starting point for building Shopify themes. Most of the heavy lifting is done with webpack and custom code. That way you can ditch slate altogether.